Hard to believe, really.

I confess that the two words in the title of this piece are ones I would never have seen writing together. To me processing is simply a mechanical step that stands between the snap and its realization. A necessary if boring interlude which should be made as fast and automated as possible to let the picture show itself to the world.

If the increasingly rapacious hardware needs of every latest version of Aperture saw me abandon the product rather than spend more money on newer, faster computers seemingly every six months, then I can only report that my first few months with Lightroom have been nothing short of bliss. Relatively speaking, that is. I still hate to process but now I don’t have the endless frustrations of spinning beach balls and lost originals that were becoming Aperture’s specialty.

First, Lightroom runs happily even on our ancient G4 iMac and second, it simply cooks on my current bottom-of-the-line MacBook (1.83gHz C2D, 2gB RAM). Second, while the interface may lack the polish of Aperture’s, who cares? You no longer need Aperture’s pretty screens to distract you while you wait for the beach ball to disappear. In Lightroom you are already three snaps down the road of production and output. In other words, Lightroom is an industrial grade tool for users who need fast, reliable throughput.

Even round trips to Photoshop are not that bad. Once CS2 is loaded (it takes 30 seconds on the MacBook as it’s running in Rosetta PPC emulation mode) a round trip to take advantage of special features not currently available in Lightroom takes a minute or so. Mostly this is to use ImageAlign or the Transform function to correct skewed and leaning verticals. Other than that, pretty much everything I need to fix a picture is in Lightroom, and I would hope that distortion correction will be added to the next full version of Lightroom in a few months.

Hearst pool cloister ceiling. 5D, fish eye, 1/1500, f/8, ISO 400, Image Align

A related benefit is the easy ability to craft import and processing presets – nothing more than one click settings which confer a bunch of preferred adjustments on your image, with full preview and undo abilities. I should add that I use RAW exclusively for my source images, whether from the 5D or LX-1.

Lone diner. One click to monochrome in Lightroom. Lumix LX-1, RAW original, ISO 80

So I’m not about to say processing is fun, but Lightroom simply makes this step as painless as anything since Polaroid gave the world instant snaps.