So I migrated to Adobe Lightroom three point zero..

Old Land, New View

Dont hit me! I am not a traitor to Photoshop CS5.. more just of a now selective user. As someone who does not yet have a massive photography catalogue (sitting between 5 and 10,000 photos) I had not yet thought much past naming conventions. Easy enough, I quite like my folder system of ‘YYMMDD Description’ It is something that will list.. probably well belong I pass (and lets hope thats many years and hundreds of thousands of photos later). Now a lot of my tog buddies have all told me about lightroom and how necessary it was. Me, well I actually came from using photoshop for graphics work, and naturally was used to the work flow. Adobe Bridge irked me much like Alan irks Charlie in Two and a Half Men. So where did that leave me? Using a third party image viewer, remembering file names I liked (or writing on postits) and generally a flow that got the job done but perhaps at a level of inefficiency that would cause strokes in the most relaxed of bean counters.

So to help me with this transition, enter stage left my friend Rob and his knowledge. He’s dropped over during the week and given me a run down on how the file management works, along with the basic use of presets, tools and exporting. Infact, paired with my previous knowledge and the detailed run through im now up and running (as you can see above). More to the point, I also now have a watermark (would like to know if you think it is too intrusive, I dislike but I digress… we are in a digital age).

Initial thoughts are .. wow.. I can quickly edit, have preset sizes and standard processing for images I do often (such as Iron Photography entries and Stormy Stormtrooper) and the ability to quickly check images on the fly, rate them, tag them, search them and sort them. I dont know why I didnt move over before?

A little tip for new users, I worked out what put me off.. it was a double sharpen.. one in LR and one in the export phase… it cost me 2 weeks of laborious photoshop work! Dont make the same mistake!

Might give a run through of some specifics over the coming months as I learn more, also perhaps how to make your own watermark.

Quiet week this week.. no sunrise.. bad weather.. but this gives me hours in the house with Stormy Stormtrooper.

Till next time..