Note: This site is currently "Under construction". I'm migrating to a new version of my site building software. Lots of things are in a state of disrepair as a result (for example, footnote links aren't working). It's all part of the process of building in public. Most things should still be readable though.

Photoshop Light Room - First Impression

Installed the trial copy of Adobe's Photoshop Lightroom today on my laptop and dropped some test images in from my 5D. I haven't done much with it, but just moving thru the images is a pleasure. It's nice and responsive for quickly moving thru a set of images. Just that is probably enough to make me get a copy. I had been using Adobe's Bridge to look thru my RAW images, and it's just not very quick. It also has a custom name import feature that I like so that I can name the filenames to my spec. For me that is making the file name in a date format: "YYYYMMDD-HHMMSS". For example, "20070223-184203.CR2". While all this data is inside the meta information as well, I like the fact that this effectively produces a unique file name for every image. I need to see if there is a way to add a "-1", "-2", "-3", etc... for times when multiple images get marked with the same second. I haven't seen this yet though. As near as I can tell with the 5D, the timestamp is based on when the file gets finished writing instead of when the image itself was catpures. The camera will shoot 3+ images a second, but it'll take several seconds to write of them. Anyway, first impression is pretty good though I haven't really dug into it yet. I've never really used meta data that much for my stuff. I just save all my shoots in a give directory, but I have a feeling I will start using it more as I play around with lightroom. Adobe has a 30 day trail on their site right now. And for the time being they have lowered the asking price from $299 to $199 for an "introductory offer". Definitely worth a try.