Lightroom convert

[Hotspur]

i got lightroom 5 for christmas and i have been learning it ever since.  my previous process was to use picasa for organizing and viewing, and paintshop pro for editing.  someone here pointed out that lightroom can be used for both (within certain limits) so i thought i would give it a try.

man, there is a lot to learn, but it has been a lot of fun trying things out.  one of my new favorite things to go (seriously, i go back into my folders and look for photos to work on) has been the lens correction feature.  not only levels the photo, but makes everything horizontal and vertical if thats what you want. its really cool. it reads the metadata from the photo and knows what lens you shot it with, then applies a correction specific to that lens.  the two photos below are the same original, the first one i processed in paintshop pro in august and the second one i did this week.  i cropped the second one differently, but thats not important. i just love how making the buildings straight improves the image. lots of other neat stuff, too.


no level adjustment, straight out of camera (but with tone and color mods)


w/ lightroom lens correction, cropped 16x9, tone and color mods

[Roxy Poodle]

I learned on Lightroom, so I've got nothing to compare it against, but I'm an enormous fan of the software. Its file management capabilities alone make it more than worth the price of admission, but it certainly seems to be extremely powerful editing software, as well. I'll likely take a Photoshop class as my next photography class, but mostly because I find the program kind of logically fascinating -- I like the challenge of having to plan out the layers and do them in the right order like a puzzle -- and because I very occasionally run into a situation where I *really* wish I had pixel-level editing capabilities. Generally though, I suspect I'll continue to rely very heavily on Lightroom.

(And I totally love the lens correction feature you demonstrated in your post! I live in NYC, and I'm obsessed with shadows and reflections on tall buildings, but prior to learning about the Lightroom fix, I'd more-or-less stopped taking pictures of them because I was always so dissatisfied with the inwardly-collapsing appearance of them. If anybody ever builds a tilt-shift lens for micro four-thirds cameras, I will drop a gigantic pile of money to own it, but until then, Lightroom lens corrections are my very close friend!)

[TK]

How many photos in your lightroom organizer?  I have about 45,000 and it KILLS iPhoto.  Need something new.

[Roxy Poodle]

How many photos in your lightroom organizer?  I have about 45,000 and it KILLS iPhoto.  Need something new.

I've got 30K photos in my catalog, and my instructor used his professional catalog for demos in class. No issues with speed in either case. Adobe markets Lightroom as professional-grade software developed first-and-foremost as file management software for professional photographers. If ultra-novice me has accumulated 30K photos in a little over a year of shooting, Lightroom it had damn well better be able to handle tens of thousands more photos with ease if Adobe's going to market it as software for professionals!

I don't know anything about iPhoto, but it appears you have the choice to use managed libraries (in which photos are copied into iPhoto on import) vs. referenced libraries (in which the application simply references the photo location). Lightroom and Aperture both use referenced libraries exclusively, which I imagine contributes to keeping the software moving along nice and quickly. (My Lightroom catalog references 316GB of photos on my external hard drive, but is only a 614MB file.) If you're wedded to iPhoto, maybe check to see if you're using managed libraries and if so, switch to referenced libraries? No idea how complicated it would be to change the photos that you've already imported, though.

Aperture is another software option, it seems. I believe it's a little cheaper than Lightroom and may be better if you're already heavily invested in iPhoto. I've never used the software so I cannot comment personally, but certainly there is no shortage of "Lightroom vs. Aperture" commentary on the internet!