Laguna Beach Bikini

We are trying to improve our digital photography workflow. I already tried Apple Aperture 2 for one month, but rejected it for several reasons that I outlined in this article: Final Verdict on Aperture 2.

So now I have completed my evaluation of Lightroom 2 on a Macintosh platform. After using the 30-day free trial of Lightroom 2.5 , we decided to purchase Lightroom 2 and use it for the majority of our post-production workflow.

Easy Transition from Bridge and Adobe Camera RAW
Anyone familiar with Bridge would be comfortable using the Library Module for rating and flagging images. And anyone familiar with ACR will find the similar commands in the Develop Module. The only significant difference between Bridge+ACR and LR2 is that LR2 uses a database and requires importing images.

Good Learning Resources
There is no shortage of books, video clips, blogs, podcasts and websites about LR2. This makes it easy to learn how to do things. It seems like it is becoming an industry standard. Also many photography schools have adopted it, such as Brooks Institute in Santa Barbara, California.

Apple’s Aperture 2 was a great program, but there were three issues that we had with Aperture 2 that were solved by going with Lightroom 2 (LR2).

1. Backward Compatible with CS2 Bridge
Our old workflow used Adobe CS2 Bridge plus Adobe Camera Raw. We have hundreds or thousands of hours invested in editing RAW and DNG files. When I open up our previously edited files in LR2, all of the edits and metadata are intact. Yay! This saves having to redo all that post work.

2. Lightroom Can Write to XMP Files amd Update DNG Files
A major shortcoming of Apeture 2 was that it could not write the edits to the DNG files. This creates a problem  when handing off DNG files to downstream workers, for example a photo retoucher. In fact, its not uncommon for a customer to ask for all the DNG files and have someone else do most of the post-production. LR2 has a command to write xmp sidecar files or update DNG files. Yay!

3. Lightroom 2 has Camera Profiles
The final shortcoming of Aperture 2 was the lack of camera profiles. It is near impossible to get the raw conversion that you want without the developer software knowing which camera was used. Now every raw converter produces a slightly different JPEG, and some are better than others, but my main requirement is that a picture that was shot with correct white balance and exposure should look excellent with default settings. It is a waste of time to take a perfectly exposed picture, only to have the raw developer screw it up so you have to move all the sliders around.

Still Think Database is Overkill
I still feel that the database philosophy is overly complex for our needs. It may be wonderful for a photographer that has a stock library with varied subjects that needs to find the needle in a haystack. They can keyword to their hearts content.

But  we don’t need any of that. Our library is large, but hierarchical. We have a a few collections of photos from different sources, and within each collection are a few hundred photosets, and within each photoset there are 100 to 500 images. There is no need for maintaining a vast database down to each individual shot.

Final Verdict
So in the end we decided that Lightroom 2 meets most of our needs.We have a couple of other RAW converters that we’ll use occasionally like RAW Developer and Nikon ViewNX, but LR2 will take over the heavy lifting from CS2 Bridge plus Adobe Camera RAW which has served well for the past few years.

Here is a great little utility program for photographers that shoot using the RAW format. It is called Instant JPEG from RAW, or IJFR. What it does is extract the native JPEG image that is embedded in camera RAW files.
Most digital cameras embed a JPEG image inside the RAW file to display on the LCD [...]

Here’s another book from Adobe Press that covers Lightroom 2: The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 HOW-TOs by Chris Orwig. This is the second Lightroom 2 book I have used, and so far I like this book the best.
Chris Orwig is a photography instructor at Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara California. I think his [...]

Adobe has made available a free 30-day trial of Photoshop Lightroom 2, the image management and processing software for Macintosh and PCs. To make best use of the trial, I recommend getting ahold of a how-to book beacuse there are way too many features to figure it all out on your own. There are several [...]

Digging through our files we found this early magazine that was devoted to the digital darkroom–Popular Fauxtography from January 1995. It had articles and tutorials devoted to computer image processing. At that time Photoshop 3.0 had recently been released, which contained Layers. which greatly enhanced the creativity of Photoshop artists.
Back then, magazines only cost 25 [...]

Adobe Lightroom 2 is the latest version of Adobe’s photo editing and management system. It competes with Apple’s Aperture 2. The retail price of Lightroom is $299 which is $100 more than Aperture. Before buying, you can try it out. They let you download the full version and use it for 30 days absolutely free.
What [...]

I was digging through out media vault the other day and found a box of PhotoCDs from the 1990s. (The Media Vault is where we store all our media “assets”–negatives, slides, 16mm movie negative, etc.) From 1993 until about 2004 we used PhotoCD extensively to digitize transparencies.

The Kodak PhotoCD System is a system for scanning [...]

Nowadays every photographer has Photoshop on his computer. It is the digital darkroom. It is now possible for photographers to do all the color correction and retouching, i.e. the entire post-production process.
But the question each photographer should ask is do you want to?
Hourly Rate for Photographers
Using this Cost of Doing Business Calculator from the National [...]

Here is a great free program for Nikon Shooters. ViewNX from Nikon is a browser for Nikon NEF format files, which is Nikon’s RAW camera format. The program is basically a viewer, but it can do many things like correct exposure and color balance. But the most important is converting NEF/RAW files into TIFF or [...]

My free trial of Aperture 2 has expired. My goal is to streamline and generally improve our Camera RAW workflow. After using Aperture 2 for a month, I decided not to purchase the program. We won’t be making it a permanent part of our workflow at this time.
Overall I enjoy using Aperture. I like the [...]

I tested four Camera RAW Developers:

Nikon D700 In-Camera,
Adobe Camera RAW 3.7,
Aperture 2.1.4 Trial
RAW Developer 1.8.5

The Test
The test was very simple. Shoot an 18% grey card that was properly exposed and see what kind of results each RAW developer produced. Each would output a JPEG file that could be examined visually and with [...]

This cliche is a standard joke on every set. The joke is that there is some problem that is being left for someone else to deal with.
Two Steps: Production/Post
As I have written elsewhere, there have always been two steps to photography: negative/print, production/post, exposing/finishing, step one/step two or however you want to call it.
Now some [...]

In Part 1 I wrote about how my role as a photographer was to deliver a good negative or chrome. Someone else, either the finishing lab or a pre-press house did the post-production work.
Kodak PhotoCD and Photoshop
Photoshop came out around 1990. We started using Photoshop 2.5 sometime around 1993. At the time we were delivering [...]

I am trying out the trial version of Aperture 2, Apple’s photo editing and organizing software. To cut to the chase, despite being an outstanding program, it does not work for us.
We have been using Adobe Bridge from Adobe CS2 to work with Camera RAW files. (See Our Digital Photography Flow described in a previous [...]

Aperture 2 is the latest version of Apple Computers photo editing and management system. The retail price is $199 which is a bargain considering everything that it does. But right now you can download the full version and use it for 30 days for free.
Apple makes tons of free documentation available in pdf file format [...]

A photographer that recently switched from film to digital writes: I just got my fancy new digital SLR. Should I shoot Camera RAW or JPEGs?
Ever since August 2002 when Adobe released Camera RAW 1.0 plug-in, this question has come up. There are often fierce debates about this subject. It is almost as religious an issue [...]

As mentioned in a previous article, there are two steps to photography: Production and post-production which correspond to Ansel Adam’s iconic books The Negative and The Print. The output of production is the negative, which is input to post-production. (The is really another step which precedes production called pre-production which involves all the planning [...]

In the novel Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, there was a soldier that would always scream, “I see everything twice!” I don’t recall exactly why but maybe he was trying to make the doctors think he was crazy so he would get excused from combat.
This phase always comes to mind when I am color-correcting images on [...]

Photoshop manipulation is ubiquitous in the magazine industry. Just about every cover photograph has been “photoshopped” to one degree or another. Unfortunately, every Photoshop artist does not always deliver work up to the highest standards of excellence. Hence the blog Photoshop Disasters.
Exploring this site is real hoot. There are pictures of models with extra hands [...]

This is an update to our Digital Photography Workflow. I wrote about the workflow in previous article. It turns out that article described the old workflow. Our new workflow is almost the same but it makes use of the new Adobe DNG Converter program.
Adobe DNG Converter
Adobe DNG Converter is a free program available for [...]