Lightroom needed?

[Severus Snape]

Hi All,

I am planning to buy a CS4, do I need Lightroom? Most of the time I shoot in RAW.

Thanks,

[Axel Hildebrandt]

CS4 comes with Bridge and ACR and unless you prefer using Lightroom you should be fine with ACR and CS4. You can download trial versions to see what workflow works best for you.

[Rodney Flowers]

You don't need Lightroom. You can get by with Adobe Bridge, which comes with CS4, for browsing and loading your images into Photoshop. However, if you take a lot of pictures an image management program like Lightroom will increase your productivity. It makes it simpler to sort your images. You can quickly do side by side comparisons on your computer screen and zoom in to check the sharpness of similar images. The first time you view your images you can quickly reject or flag images using keyboard shortcuts. IMO Lightroom speeds up the sorting and management process. If you can afford it then buy it or another image management program.

[Rob Stratton]

I started with CS4/ACR/Bridge and gave Lightroom a try just recently. I run both a laptop and a desktop in different locations, and found that sharing a common external HD between the two machines really caused problems with lightroom and I was constantly misplacing files.( It's a little confusing with Lightroom not actually moving/saving the files, only indexing them.) I have found that with the exception of Lightroom being easier to print from, I can do everything with bridge/ACR and my files stay where I put them.

[James Shadle]

In Lightroom 2 you can handle files like Bridge does if you choose to do so.

[Fabs Forns]

I don't use Lightroom at all.

[Don Hamilton Jr.]

okay what should we use, then? Thks for sharing/
Don

[Fabs Forns]

Lightroom is an excellent cataloging program. It will handle your conversion and basic editing. Some stuff you need Photoshop for.
So I just use CS4.
Alfred LOVES Lightroom.

[Rob Stratton]

I suspect that 99% of my issues were "operator error", but Bridge just seemed a little more intuitive. I'm pretty new to photography, and post software in particular, so I'll take any little edge I can get.

[Jared Gricoskie]

Like many folks I use lightroom 2 to get my photos into a catalog, keyword, and do the ACR stuff in Lightroom. Then go to CS3 for the final product often.

The one and only reason however I bought lightroom originally was both my D200 and D300 developed hot pixels, and it would have cost me far more to send them in to be remapped than the price of lightroom which automatically removes the hot pixels without a single click.

Another factor I see lightroom is great for is the speed of culling over bridge. I'm running on a fast pc (32 bit however) and I found that bridge moves like a snail even with 3.5gb of ram dedicated to adobe stuff. (yeah I know I need to go to 64bit, but my other work requirements don't offer 64bit drivers) Where lightroom once everything is loaded up I can breeze through all my pics hitting the next button as fast as I like. The shear time I save in culling was what made lightroom for me. After learning its great resources and interface its a vital part of my PP.

[Rodney Flowers]

Adobe Bridge is probably a little more straight forward. To take advantage of Lightroom you really have to spend some time learning how to operate it. I believe it is quicker when culling through images. Learning the keyboard shortcuts make it faster.

I actually took a couple of classes which helped me to learn lightroom. All of the things I learned in the classes I could have learned on my own, but by taking the classes I spent a lot less time learning the important aspects of lightroom.

[Don Hamilton Jr.]

Cool stuff, man i'm finding it difficult to find the time to learn all of this new stuff, truly a journey i suppose.
Thks for posting!
Don

[Rob Stratton]

Yes,I can see where it definitely has some advantages. I picked up a Scott Kelby "manual" for lightroom and will give that a go. I probably need to just blow out the library and start again as that is where I have problems. I use a common external hard drive between two seperate work areas (like, 400miles seperate) and I must not be importing/saving/creating galleries properly because quite often I'll try to re-edit an image and I get a "file not found "error.
I must say I really like printing from lightroom. It's fast, and I don't run into the color management issues like I do in CS4. I know 99% of my issues are operator error-maybe I could pass the last 1% on to Vista.

[Linwood Ferguson]

There's a series of books out called "Real World Camera Raw" by (the late) Bruce Fraiser. I highly recommend it when using either Lightroom or Photoshop.

Why am I mentioning it? Because after reading it, while using only Photoshop, I found myself using ACR within bridge and spending less and less time inside of Photoshop proper. For color and exposure globally, and even some spot work, ACR is actually better than photoshop due to working in the pre-demosiaced color spaces.

If you spend time with ACR and get comfortable with it, and like me find the need for photoshop proper less and less, you are half way to becoming a Lightroom convert, because Lightroom's photo editing is really just ACR wrapped up a bit differently. Exactly the same ACR, they maintain them more or less in parallel (+/- timing issues).

What Lightroom does is change the paradigm for bridge. In CS3 for me, bridge did almost everything I need, just poorly and slowly. Lightroom is blazingly fast as it is a real database, not relying on caches. It also added different ways to organize that were more useful, if a bit less intuitive than folder=file=only-organizational-structure.

If your challanges are all in editing, Photoshop it is.

If you need a better tool for organizing and culling and finding old shots, Lightroom wins hands down.

But they aren't really competitors (Bridge vs. Lightroom is), I need both.