Lightroom vs. Breezebrowser

[Roger Williams]

Can someone (or more than one) please clarify for me the difference between Lightroom and Breezebrowzer. I'm somewhat familiar with Lightroom and its applications. But, I hear cudos for Breezebrowzer on this site and don't have a clue as to what it is or where its available. And, since I use PS Elements 5.0, is Breezebrowser compatible?

Finally, is quick mask a function of CS3 or APATS (sp)?

Thanks

[Alfred Forns]

BB and LR are not competing programs. Both will sort and convert but that is the only similarity.

BB is only available for the PC. It is for sorting and RAW converting. Some people sure that its the best conversion available.

Quiock mask is a part of PS. You basically hit the "Q" to enter quick masks, select the "B" for brush and paint your selection. BTW make sure the black box in on the foreground (black on top of white) When you finish hit "Q" again and you are out of quick mask. You will see the marching ants over your the area. In APTATS it is used within other procedures Highly recommend getting.

[Robert Amoruso]

Roger,

Alfred covered some of the differences but to me, someone that uses it for all my editing and most conversions, the two best thing that BBPro does is quickly render the embedded JPG files (A JPG is embedded in RAW files to allow you to preview the image before conversion - it is the same thing that you are viewing on the back of cameras LCD) and in the preview the file is sharpened.

Fast is good as I want to edit my images quickly and my first important criterion is that I can judge critical sharpness. In BBPrp's preferences is the ability to set a different levels of sharpening for the preview image. The default (75 amount) is just right. Then when you look at the preview in what is called High Quality mode, the image is sharpended. You can toggle in and out of HQ mode and the difference is radical.

In ACR or LR, the preview is not sharpened and you have to use the interface an slider to affect sharpening to determine if the image is truly sharp. That is a royal pain IMO. Whenever I run workshops and someone asks me this same question, I tell the this. The response is, ACR or LR does that, I say show me. What I get shown is - this image "looks" sharp (as we view an unsharpend version), then they use the sharpening sliders to sharpen it in the interface.

Then I show them BBPro's sharpened in the preview HQ mode. The response is always that this is a great feature. As far as I know BBPro is the only one that does this. To me that is the biggest plus and makes it worth the investment alone. Besides, it is a great conversion program that I still like better then the current versions of ACR (LR uses ACR or Adobe Camera Raw).

APTATS is Robert O'Toole's CD of Photoshop tips and techniques that use the capabilities of PS (namely Quick Mask) to create masks in PS among other things. It is a great CD and changed how I do a lot of my PS work. See more at http://www.aptats.com/ and contact Robert O'Toole for specifics.

I hope this helps.

[Roger Williams]

Thanks for the comments, Al and Robert. Sounds like BBP's the way to go for editing. Does BBP also have cataloging and enhancement capabilities similar to LR? Do you use LR or rely on a combination of PS and BBP? I'm trying to determine which purchase will be the most useful to me.

[David Kennedy]

Thanks for the comments, Al and Robert. Sounds like BBP's the way to go for editing. Does BBP also have cataloging and enhancement capabilities similar to LR? Do you use LR or rely on a combination of PS and BBP? I'm trying to determine which purchase will be the most useful to me.

I might actually suggest that they're both worth owning. I use LR for all adjustments, conversion, cataloging, keywording, ranking, and often for exporting to the web. However, Robert illustrated its shortcoming: speed when sorting through hundreds of incoming images.

Therefore, it can be useful to go through and delete your obvious "duds" with BB first, and then import the images into LR for the rest of your sorting and editng. BB has no ability to keyword, rank, or catalog. It is a browser, kind of like Adobe Bridge, whereas LR is a catalog, more akin to iView Media Pro/Microsoft Expression Media (only way-the-frak more powerful).

Oh, I should note that if you're going to own both BB and LR, don't bother to buy "Downloader Pro." You can drag-and-drop from the flash card to the desktop, sort through with BB, and then import those images into LR. The importation process in LR is far more advanced than Downloader Pro could ever hope to be, as you can assign keywords, default rankings, and metadata to all images on-the-fly for import. BB is restricted to giving the files new names, whereas LR can do that and a helluva lot more. Because I'm suggesting you copy the files from the CF card anywhere for BB, you should tell LR to "copy to a new location and import." That way, they can go in a much more orderly place, and then you can delete the folder from the desktop.

As for the "much more orderly place," all my images from 2008 are in a "2008" folder on my external RAID array. Inside, they go into a folder called "03 March 2008." Inside that, they might go into a folder (that LR creates itself, because it can read the date captured from the embedded metadata from the camera) called 2008-03-30. Then, I have LR set so that all my photos will be automatically re-named to 2008-03-30_ORIGINAL-FILENAME-HERE.cr2.
That part is useful because, especially with my trigger-happy finger and my Mark II, I will avoid ever having two files named "9999.cr2." There might be two files that end in 9999.cr2, but both will be prefaced by the date in which they were captured, so they'll never be confused as the same file.

[Roger Williams]

Thank you David. Your comparison of the two programs is very useful to me (and I suggest others who read this thread). All of this software is quite new to me and its easy to invest in "stuff" that doesn't accomplish the desired results. Particularly, we don't need to buy programs that do the same thing. Thanks again to all for contributing to my knowledge base.

roger

[Alfred Forns]

Roger I could add that I do not use LR for quick editing

On the Mac side we don't have BB so I use PhotoMechanic It is just as fast since it reads the embedded jpeg Both LR and Aperture generate their own However once generated it will look a lot better than what you see in BB When I get home after having thrown out most I make my final selection in LR

First you need to set up LR in the first place You need to specify in the preferences how the images are going to show, resolution etc It is under preference>general>catalog settings If you don't you will be disappointed and complain about sharpness etc.

Before doing the final editing I will select all the images and generate a 1 to 1 preview The images will pop one after the other with zero delays Like anything else you need to dig in and understand the product to get the most out of it

As of today I would recommend for the PC people Downloader Pro for getting the card into the computer, BB for editing in the field than taking to LR For the Mac PhotoMehanic and LR !!!

[Robert Amoruso]

Roger,

David and Alfred made additional good points. You can go correction in BBPro but it is not real time or very interactive so the only thing I might ever do is white balance and a levels correction (called exposure) that allows me to expand out the tonal range if I underexposed.

You can tag and rank images in BBPro but I only use it to do that for editing.

I like LR but don't use it as I find I will be into PS 9 out of 10 times so prefer to do the conversion in BBPro and open right into PS as a TIFF file or covert in ACR and open into PS. That my workflow and I am sticking with it. :) For now anyway.

There is a lot of discussion that doing as much optimization in the conversion process is advantageous as it is being done on the RAW data before a TIFF Graphic file is ever written. So using ACR or LR to optimize before conversion is a recommended workflow.

I continue to use Downloader Pro even though Bridge will download as BBPro can be set to be fully automatic - load card into computer, using pre-defined setup it will amend file names, saved to HD, delete card and close program. Repeat process to download images.

IF you ever went on an Artie IPT and find us all at lunch already download and ready to edit, BBPro is the reason why. We can download while driving. :)

[Ed Okie]

Roger, might I suggest you simply try BB Pro... free download, free trial period, and it's fully functional. Nothing beats using a product to see if it works for you. I've been using it for years - I wish all programs were written as well, were as truly functional, and relatively simple at the same time. Big bonus: author Chris Breeze is - very - responsive to queries. He also has actual photo experience (Canon 5D), is not some geek sitting behind a desk divining "how things should work."

[Bill Carr]

Hi All, Here's my 2 cents on lightroom vs/+ BBP: I first like to quickly go through and delete the shots that are OOF or otherwise not wanted. After I've narrowed my 1000 image shoot down to about 50 or less images, I "import" them into LR (it's more like creating a reference than an import, as it only references your original image). I then do my pre-processing: Crop, Exposure, Blackpoint (Levels), Vibrance (sometimes), Saturation, Curves, NR, and Sharpening, all in LR, just to get an idea as to how the image might look after Post Processing for Print. All of this in RAW.

Here's the BIG difference: I can save that as a "Snapshot", calling it "001 crop1" (initial parameters 001, crop1), for instance. I can then tweak any of the above parameters, including the crop, save it as another "Snapshot", calling it 002 crop2 8x10 V", then create another one called "002 crop3 8x10 H", and another one "002(or 001) crop4 square closeup", and I can desaturate to B&W if wanted. This can all be done very quickly.

I now have 6 differently cropped and processed versions of my original image. But the BIG deal is that I have not had to create 6 TIFFs (~30 MB ea) in the process. What I have is the original image in the original location on the HD (~10MB), and 6 different views of that image avilable in LR. What I really like aboutthat is that I don't have 6 copies of the same image on my HD, clogging up my directory of images. I only have the one original, and when I'm in browse mode in LR, I only see the one image, not all 6. I hate seeing 6 images of the same thing, and having to figure ot the difference from the filename.

Then I can pick the favorite "Snapshot" or the original image, send it to PS (creates 1 TIFF), PP, print, mount, etc. I still have all of the "Snapshots" available for future use, sending to web, etc.

I used BBP for 5 years, and still use it or something similar, to do the initial edit (deleting unwanted images). I love BBP's speed for the field edit.

Just my 2c.

[W T Lloyd]

Exactly. Ditto to a T.