Lightroom 4

jonnyapple

Seven, better to just be a photoshop professional, right?

It's a little inappropriate at times, but the you suck at photoshop series (find it on youtube) is pretty entertaining and actually gives some good ideas if you only slightly suck at photoshop.

Here's an episode (first youtube video I've tried to link to here, so we'll see if it works):

sevencrossing

 

How is this done in LR? Will the editing I do in PS be reflected back into the non-destructive editing of LR or is this process similar to what Aperture does?

Because of the way PS works your edits in PS are " fixed " and have to be  "saved  " but with a LR  / PS combination, you can choose how your edits are saved; they can be PSD or TIFF or I think even jpeg  but the original RAW file is not changed  you can stack the PS edit with the LR edit

Hope this makes sense

 

 as mentioned, many times before, Matt K at Kelby training has some excellent videos on this

jonnyapple

... as mentioned, many times before, Matt K at Kelby training has some excellent videos on this

Okay, so there are some real resources out there, too. ;-)

spraynpray

That vid is hilarious Jonny!   )

But nothing to do with this thread [-X

BabaGanoush

sideways said:  Unfortunately i've had a few experiences over the years when I've needed to do a complete software reinstall and time machine backups have failed to restore.

Agreed.  That why I keep two versions of the OS on two different drives of my 4-drive Mac Pro, lagged in terms of update versions. Plus I keep a separate clone of my entire primary drive (the one on which my LR app and library reside) on a bootable external eSATA drive, which is smart-updated each night.  It's easy to do when you have 7TB of internal disk space and another 7TB of external disk storage.  As you say, storage is cheap, but the image files of the D800 push the envelope.

BabaGanoush

Correlli said:  "I wonder how seamless the integration of PS is into LR. Currently I use Aperture and PS and what I don't like here is, as soon as I edit a photo in PS (from within Aperture) my raw file will get converted into a TIFF and I basically loose the non-destructive editing advantage I got in Aperture.  How is this done in LR? Will the editing I do in PS be reflected back into the non-destructive editing of LR or is this process similar to what Aperture does?"

If you invoke any external editor such as PS from within LR, you can choose to edit the original file or a copy of the original file having the LR edits embedded within it.  I normally opt for a tiff copy of the original file.  When you close your external editing session, the modified tiff file generated by your external editor then becomes available within LR.  Any further changes you make within LR to that file will be edited non-destructively from that point on.  The original LR image file of course will remain available to you, completely unchanged, in case you decide to reject the external edits or to do them over again in a different manner.

Msmoto

@ ;jonnyapple
I use LR 4.3.....seems to work, but I have to use the clone tool to do this stuff with the cat.  But, I have to be very careful because my cat is sensitive.  And this means if I irritate her (read an explicative into this if you like) I get a present...like a dead mouse, chipmunk, live bird, etc., and it is delivered into the house through the cat door.
So, I have to fiddle in LR with dogs only, but be careful my kid's Pit, Cane Corso/Pit mix and Rottweiler do not see me.  The dogs are much more direct with their comments.
@ ;BabaGanoush 
Excellent point... I will use duplicate images in some cases so as to be able to examine the original edited image in one program to the results of another.

PB_PM

Keep in mind, Aperture, and LR are non destructive with all files, RAW or not. They simply draw from the original file and create a new one each time you make an edit.

Havoc

This was what I was looking for....a lot of great input and help. I seen some reviews complaining about importing/lossing files and and was a bit worried about it, but this out helps greatly. Thanks everyone for your thoughts and suggestions!!

My D800 arrived a couple days ago and I've been playing. This thing is fantastic! Took a shot and not realizing it until I downloaded them onto my laptop, but the shot picked up the water droplets off the pine needles.....I have a long way to go with mastering this rig but it's going to be a fun ride.

jonnyapple

Congrats, Havoc. Good luck!

SkimMilk

Haven't used other programs before but I'm really happy using LR4 so far. Eases a lot on the workflow. Anyone starting out on LR should take a look at Matt Kloskowski's LR training. Has a lot of nice tips and ways to optimize the workflow.

And I'm with Golf on the way I import my pictures. I copy the raw and jpegs onto my NAS before firing LR and importing them into the database.

NAS is running on RAID5, and I make LR create a copy of the database on to my NAS as a backup. This puts me at ease on having backups for my photos and work.

friedmud

Mike I agree,

Any professional photographer should have a good  understanding of, how Photoshop works, what it is capable off , and the difference  between PS and LR. They need to be aware of the tasks that are better carried out in PS rather than LR But PS is a huge and very complicated program . If  major retouching or  manipulation is required, IMHO this is best left to the photoshop professionals  

I disagree. "Needing" to know PS depends on your own personal style. My style is very natural and I strive to do as much in camera and in the field as possible... with only light editing in Lightroom (been an LR user since 3 came out). You can see some of my images here:

http://500px.com/friedmud

And it's not that I don't know PS... I worked as a graphic artist for a time mainly working with PS. For me, my real job has me sitting in front of a computer all day... photography is my way of getting outside.... and I try to limit the time I spend editing my photos by using good technique and good field tools (light ND grad filters). But everyone makes photography what they want it to be and I know several people that expose explicitly _for_ manipulation with PS. To each his own.

Now, back to the subject. I think LR is indispensable. The first thing I tell people getting into photography is to immediately have a plan for organizing the photos you take. So many people don't think about this and within a short period of time they have a huge mess on their hands with thousands of files spread out across their hard drive and multiple memory cards.

Get some software (LR, Aperture or even Picasa!), have a plan and stick to it. My work flow is like this:

1. My photography computer is a 27" iMac
2. Fire up LR4
3. Stick my SD card into the built-in slot
4. Import NEF
4a. My catalog is organized with a folder for each year.
4b. Within each year my events are in folders numbered sequentially with a descriptive name ie:

035 Yellowstone Weekend
036 John's Wedding

5. Choose an event to edit (I do them in chronological order)
6. Using the "Filter Bar" I select "Picked" and "Not Flagged" photos (ie I _dont_ select "Rejected").
7. In the Library module I go through each photo, pressing "x" on my keyboard to reject photos (I generally keep about 1/5th of what I shoot... good photographers know what to keep and what to get rid of)
8. If there are several shots that are similar, I love the "compare" view to go from 10 similar photos down to one by comparing each one against the others and rejecting as I go.
9. With the photos paired down... Time to go over to the Develop module and work them up
10. In the Develop module you can still press "x" t reject even more photos
11. After working up the remaining photos I make one more pass through them and reject even more if possible.
12. Next comes Titling and tagging in the Library module, every photo gets a title and multiple tags. Tags are the NLY way to efficiently deal with a large library.
13. Upload full resolution jpegs to. Yep, every photo goes to Flickr... it's part of my backup strategy.
14. Quit Lightroom.
15. Leave computer on to perform a Time Machine backup to an external hard drive automatically.


This is pretty efficient and leads to a nice clean and lean, but very large, photo catalog that I can easily navigate and search to get exactly what I want.

spraynpray

"15. Leave computer on to perform a Time Machine backup to an external hard drive automatically."

Can't you get Lightroom to copy your files to the external drive during import?

friedmud

"15. Leave computer on to perform a Time Machine backup to an external hard drive automatically."

Can't you get Lightroom to copy your files to the external drive during import?

No reason to... I don't want a copy of my RAW files somewhere... I want a perfect backup of my catalog and photos (and everything else on my computer) so I can get back to exactly where I was before a drive failure (or before I did something stupid, like accidentally delete half my catalog or something). Time Machine gives me that capability... It gives me perfect insurance against essentially anything... and means that I can always get back to the state my whole computer was at just a little bit ago (or yesterday, or last week).

The only thing it doesn't protect against is my house burning down. For that reason I have two time machine drives that I swap in and out... Leaving the other at a good friend's house (they are encrypted drives as well). I swap them in and out about every 4 months or so...