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.

Beta testing is the way to go.

Adobe has just released Lightroom 2.0 Beta allowing all and sundry to bang away at it in a sort of group grope-wiki software development approach which I can only applaud.

Localized corrections in the Develop module and multiple monitor use seem to be the most useful enhancements – this is enough to call it 2.0 or are earnings hurting? Still, Adobe is adopting the right development approach.

There’s no soft proofing support yet, but read this for a workaround.

Interestingly, the ‘10,000 pixels a side’ import file size limit (meaning files cannot be over 10k pixels on either dimension or more than 100mB in total) has been increased to 30,000. I actually ran into the 10,000 pixel limit when migrating from Aperture to Lightroom on some big scans of 4″x5″ originals, so this is not as odd as it at first sounds.

Anyone can use the 2.0 Beta but to extend the trial past 30 days you either have to be a registered 1.x user or ask Adobe nicely. There’s a neat tutorial here. In a related tutorial an easy way of exporting, say, multiple images to Photoshop, such as in HDR photography is explained. The enhancements allowing multiple image printing on one page are nothing short of superb – some 5 minutes into this tutorial.

Is Adobe trying too hard? With 2.0 Beta newly out and 1.4.1 still in need of repair, is Adobe unnecessarily rushing things?

While I have no access to current data, assuming that PC users outnumber Mac zealots by 4:1, it’s not like Aperture is a competitor. Add the fact that Aperture 2.0 seems to require the costliest Mac to run half decently (if then), whereas Lightroom potters along nicely on an ancient G4 Mac, I somehow doubt there are going to be too many users switching from Lightroom to Aperture. In fact, I would guess they are about as common as people looking for permanent resident status in North Korea. Trust me, Abobe, I only want to go through this hell once, so there’s no way you are about to lose me as a user unless something better comes along and it uses LR’s catalogs without need for conversion.

However, given how few people use Macs, I wonder whether Adobe would be better off canning half the Lightroom development team and spending the savings on properly marketing 1.4. Lightroom 2.0 is nice but, let’s face it, it can wait and you are not going to dump Aperture just because of this Lightroom Beta upgrade which isn’t even ready for prime time.

And, please, no comments about how photographers are disproportionately users of Macs. The sole reason you visit this blog is to read about photography and 80% of you, according to my statistics, use Internet Explorer. Last I checked, that piece of garbage doesn’t even run on a Mac …. and anyone using IE with Parallels on a Mac truly needs a lobotomy. And I’ll bet that of the 20% using Safari, some are running it on Windows and many don’t use Aperture in any case. So the 4:1 LR:Aperture user ratio is probably understated.

Sure, all the toadies, sycophants, commercial flacks and those otherwise in the pay of Adobe will extol the virtues of 2.0 and praise Adobe for its community spirit. Utter nonsense. Adobe is a stockholder-owned public company. It’s primary duty, as with any public company, it to maximize the wealth of its shareholders, not tell us about its great good heart and wonderful social policies.

So, Abode, fire a dozen developers (starting with the fellow who approved 1.4.1 for release) – $1-2mm saved – and roll something like this out.

“Aperture users! Make Lightroom run twice as fast. On your ten year old Mac. Invest the hardware savings in a new Nikon D3 instead”.

And let’s face it, Adobe, your stock is nothing to write home about.

Or, better still Adobe, write a proper converter for Aperture to Lightroom catalogs and sell Lightroom at 50% of retail to anyone downloading it and sending in the box top from their Aperture software. Now that’s something that might make me show some interest in your stock and it would pay for itself with the first few conversions. It might even preclude an imminent hostile takeover though I’m conflicted here as I would far rather own the stock is someone wants to acquire you for a premium to the quoted price.

Some convenient enhancements.

Since publishing my first piece on how to profile monitors and printers for use with Lightroom, I have made a couple of interesting discoveries.

First, I listened to Adobe Podcast#1 (with Mark Hamburg, Kevin Tieskoetter and Jeff Schewe) from Apple’s iTunes store (search podcasts on “Lightroom”) which speaks to profiling (they are speaking about Lightroom Beta Release #4 for the Mac) and was intrigued to note that that we shared the same approach. The development team (a lot of very smart, well informed, outspoken engineers – highly recommended listening) does exactly what I published with regard to the use of Colorsync, letting the printer manage colors, not Lightroom. This philospohy is printer agnostic. Epson, HP, Canon, you name it.

My approach requires making Lightroom use Apple’s Colorsync utility to manage colors. You need a properly profiled screen and I describe in that earlier piece a very accurate way of doing that which does not even require a colorimeter, provided you follow certain disciplines regarding ambient lighting.

I suggest you give this method a try. Your maximum cost is a few minutes, a couple of pieces of paper and some ink. And the money saved on a Colorimeter (wish I had been that smart when I bought mine) will pay for a lot of paper and ink. It does not matter who makes your printer for this screen profiling approach to work.

The other thing I discovered is that it is possible to save the Colorsync setting in the Printer Profile – something I stated frustration at not being able to do.

I had forgotten that there is a ‘Save’ setting in the print dialog box. So elect Colorsync in Print Settings->PaperType/Quality then Save the setting with a meaningful name. I have named my saved file “HP Photo Satin – Colorsync” which states the paper type I chose before saving and obviously uses the Colorsync utility. Note that this named setting is independent of Lightroom’s Print templates – you choose it at print time after selecting a Print template. The printer dialog box dictates color management, the Lightroom Print template controls the paper size, margins and picture layout on the page.

Then, when it’s time to Print, I simple choose this drop down menu option in the Print dialog box (I have not yet figured out how to make it the default, something I would like to do as that’s what I use nearly all the time – what I need to do is work out how to delete the ‘Standard’ setting, I’m guessing, at the OS file level). A quick check – see the following screen picture – confirms that the Colorsync setting has, indeed, been saved and will be used when printing.

Now I am assured that both the right paper profile and the correct Colorsync setting is made without having to check yet another layer of menus in the print dialog box. So printing really is a breeze. I have created three templates – for three different paper sizes. That’s all I need, as I always use the same HP paper.

I learned an interesting thing from this podcast – what do you think Adobe did for the Lightroom development team for Christmas of 2005? They gave each member a digital camera and encouraged them to take lots of pictures. Maybe the resulting stress testing has something to do with the application’s speed? I wonder whether Apple ever considered doing that for its Aperture developers? Or do they simply get a $7,000 Mac Pro and 30″ screen which will run anything well ….

To Photoshop, that is.

While the slightly up-tilted camera distortion is not that bad here, a quick round trip (Command-E on a Mac) from Lightroom to Photoshop CS2 and a few seconds with the ImageAlign plug-in sets things dead straight. Command-S in CS2 saves the corrected version as a TIFF file in Lightroom. ImageAlign is not just for de-fishing fisheye snaps!

Cropping of the perspective-corrected result in Lightroom – a superbly implemented tool.

Here’s the before and after – a subtle change but worthwhile:

Here’s the final result. Magical late sunlight. California sky.

Tough neighborhood. 5D, 20mm, 1/750, f/11. ISO 250.

You can see some lens vignetting but I left it uncorrected as it heightens the center of interest. My shadow works – at least for me!