LR3
explorology replied to your photo
how do you like it?
Shame on me for taking so long to get around to replying to this. In the elapsed time dpreview.com has published their review of Lightroom 3, so let’s pretend I was waiting for that and never speak of my failure ever again.
Basically (i.e. the twitter version), Lightroom = Adobe Camera Raw + More Stuff. I took a second to try to further define “more stuff”, but they share more than in common I thought (plus, everyone knows how to use a search engine). To be honest, I haven’t spent more than a few hours playing with Lightroom. In the past two months I’ve only needed to edit a few pictures here and there. In that case, the bulk of PhotoShop is tolerable, if not better.
So why do I care? What’s the big picture? Well, the story behind Lightroom is pretty neat—it was developed as a clean break from previous Adobe software. This shows in huge gains in performance* and UI**.
* It’s fast. Just take a look at the size of the binary: 90 MB. To compare, iPhoto is 430 MB. Ok, so that includes code to run on PPC Macs, but even a fourth of that is larger than Lightroom.
** Just play with it. To keep this from being too lazy of a blog post, will point out that even keyboard shortcuts are different from Adobe standards. Kind of frustrating at first.
If you work with an Adobe program long enough you will inevitably wonder what it would be like if all the legacy junk can be tossed away. How it would look and function if it was developed from scratch. PhotoShop is the big one of course, and there are already answers to this in the form of programs like Acorn and Pixelmator.
Lightroom doesn’t answer this specific question (it’s not a pixel-level editor), but it was developed with the same methodology in mind. The result is fantastic. People who hate Adobe love Lightroom.
