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486 of 492 found the following review helpful:
 Very Useful Program for Digital Photo Pre-Use Management Jul 22, 2010
By Dean C. Broome Jr. MD
Those familiar with Photoshop might wonder why an additional product should be needed to manage digital images. I would offer this difference: Photoshop is a program for image manipulation; it's for folks who want to change their photographs or create new substance in an image. Lightroom is a program that, primarily, expedites photography workflow. [By using the term "workflow," I don't mean to imply that it's geared only to those who are in the profession of photography; amateurs and hobbyists alike (like I am), who also wish to prepare quickly and print images, can benefit from this highly-practical and time-efficient program.] You can "tweak" pics very nicely with Lightroom, but Photoshop's the paragon for substantial alteration.
Lightroom 3 simplifies enormously the process of preparing photo captures for use, whether as web or print applications. It facilitates quick organization & preview, raw enhancement, printing, and web uploading of photos.
The "library" module permits quick organization of picture groups. The amazing, work-saving catalog system allows rapid naming, labeling & flagging, copying, metadata editing & review, and filtering of files, then presents a robust preview for easy access to the rest of the photographic workflow. A stellar feature of the file handling is the (relatively) low memory burden placed on computer RAM -- most all of these activities originate from small files that make good use of the .dng formatting.
The "develop" module contains all of the necessary controls to adjust exposure, correct lens aberrations, establish a good white point to remove color casts, manipulate color and grayscale attributes, crop, retouch discreet areas of a photo, and, generally, to perform all the actions of an after-the-fact camera, insofar as these are possible, to improve the raw (proprietary or .dng) images that come from a digital source. White point color correction is particulary easy - and requires only a few skillful mouse motions (as opposed to Photoshop, in which color correction is either mindlessly automated or involves multi-step curve adjustments). One very fine feature in Lightroom is the ability to create instantly a "virtual copy" of your photo, which you can edit, change, enhance, etc. -- all without altering your original file.
The "slideshow" module lets you combine photos into a presentation for automatically viewing a sequence of photos as slides. Text can be added, as well as an intro slide and a conclusion slide. You can even add a music file to the background of your presentation, and the program will automatically time your slideshow to the length of your music clip. Slideshows can then be downloaded into a variety of different video formats (including mp4, which I use most frequently).
Finally, the "print" or "web" modules expedite the last-step output to the desired final product. There's a marvelous preview of your photo presented prior to the actual printing. Multiple photos or copies of the same photo can be easily grouped and previewed on a single sheet for cost-effective printing. Downloading to the web is a cinch. There's even a feature to upload your photos automatically to a Flickr account and (in the updated version) to Facebook.
Though a learning curve is associated with attaining mastery of Lightroom, I think the controls are quite intuitive. As a virtual neophyte who has had the product for only a short time, I've been able to output some very satisfying images to my printer.
I've been an Adobe fan since the dark ages of computer imagery in the 1980's [Pagemaker license number was issued by Aldus], and this product once again confirms their hegemony in the realm of computer graphics.
Conclusion: Lightroom 3 is a highly recommended program for those who like to snap and publish digital photos.
324 of 327 found the following review helpful:
LR 3 Very good for for the right person Aug 24, 2010
By Hank
I'll start off by saying I thought $300 for a photo program was more than I wanted to spend. I had tried the 30 day trial when LR2 came out, but couldn't get in enough keyboard time during the 30 day trial period. I decided to try the Beta when LR3 B1 came out and actually got about 70 days under my belt before B2 expired.
I had bought and used Elements 3 and 7, and while pretty good enhancers, there organizational abilities were weak. By weak, I mean, once they were catalogued and or key worded, they were fine, but the key wording was tedious.
Enter LR3. It doesn't have the capability of Elements (or photoshop either, I assume) but it does have enough capability to handle 90+% of what I do. What I usually do is correct color and exposure, saturate or desatureate some colors to enhance the image or de-emphasize the back ground, sharpen things up a bit and or decrease noise, mostly luminous, and apply the lens correction feature. I have also used the curves feature and the section I think they call shade, saturation and Lumination to make local adjustment to brightness and color. All in all, I can make almost all reasonably exposed photos, (+-2.5 stops) look pretty good. The program doesnot have the capability to distort shape, color or texture for artistic purposes, which I do not do at this time. The program does have a perspective correction section which I have had reasonable success with on the small number of uses I have had with it.
I have dabbled in the other features, such as healingand red eye reduction (easy and effecetive), paint brushing, tinting etc. My experience here is limited, but the features seem to be effective.
Its real standout is organization. I had about 11,000 photos in my file which I reduced to about 8000 by using the easy to use "compare mode". I also keyworded these images in about 2 weeks of daily effort averaging 2 to 4 hours per day. ( a concentrated effort for sure). The keywords are easy to set up and the program's auto-type and table of recent keywords is very helpful and a great time saver.
In general, I say if your main goal is organization of your file, perhaps coupled with a desire for slide show, this program has a lot of features to consider, (I did not use the print or post to facebook sections at all). If you're into MAJOR image correction or enhancement, for artistic purposes, this program will fall short. I hope this helps.
85 of 88 found the following review helpful:
Awesome for processing high volumes... Jul 08, 2010
By Well of Mimir
Lightroom 3 was an awesome addition to my studio. Prior to using lightroom I was using Bridge and PhotoShop to process all my photos. If you go out and shoot a few photos a week I would not recommend dropping the cash to get lightroom. If you shoot or want to shoot 1000+ images a day and don't want to spend most of your time in front of a computer doing post work, buy lightroom 3.
Performance: Lightroom 3 works amazingly well on computer running a 64bit OS like win7. After watching a few tutorial videos on the program I was able to add lightroom to my work-flow and get files edited and to my clients about twice as fast as just using BR/PS.
Great for:
1.Noise reduction (simple and awesome)
2.Making small to medium adjustments to photos quickly
3.Managing photo meta data
4.cataloging and sorting
5.getting images to the web
6.printing packages
7.slide shows
8....
280 of 305 found the following review helpful:
 Software with a lot of depth, many excellent features... Sep 09, 2010
By Bass Lake
"Dan"
Lightroom3 is a fantastic piece of software that is an excellent tool for the professional or serious amateur. There are many reviews here and elsewhere on the web that describe its functionality in great detail, so there is no need for me to bother with that here.. I use the software and recommend it highly. I would suggest that you take the time to tour the Adobe Learning site that has many excellent video tutorials that will give you an in depth look at the software in actual use in real life situations. A picture (or video in this case) is definitely worth a thousand words.
See on the web: [...]
However, I want to bring to your attention one serious potential technical problem with software designs like Lightroom. My own professional background has included a stint in software design and programming so the following is information that I want to share with you, but it is information that you will most likely not hear about in the photographic press or other locations that are likely to be talking about Lightroom. Here is the issue: * Central to its core and necessary for operation of Lightroom is a proprietary database system that holds all user entered data for recipe or change files to your RAW development, as well as dozens of other variables and user entered and program generated data and variables. Lightroom *does not* embed the change information into the image files. This is a very dangerous design leap in the making of Lightroom. Why do I say that? What can go wrong here?
Very simply put, if anything corrupts or makes unavailable that proprietary database, then you can kiss good by what might be hundreds of hours and possibly years of work that you inputted while using the program over whatever amount of days, weeks, months or years that you were using Lightroom as your tool of choice for handling your photo library.
It is not clear that Lightroom can make sense of and reconstruct its database in the event of a replaced hard disk unless the RAW and JPEG image files are placed on the new replacement disk in the exact format and file hierarchy and structure of the old disk. Therefore, you must keep image backups of your disks, just having the data is not enough, the structure of the data in the file system must be preserved. You must assure yourself that your backup software can place back this disk image if called upon to do so in the future.
Additionally several other things might cause you real problems: You can be so foolish as to not back up the database files to multiple locations that will survive the common physical risks of fire, theft, hardware crashes, etc. We will assume that you are a good computer user and have an off premises back up system and also at least two other removable and transportable hard drives onto which you will keep your back up database files. So you have that base covered. No worry there for you!
It's number #3.) that most people never think about but happens once in a great while. It is, admittedly, a long shot but so is winning the lottery. But people do win, or in this case loose. It is this "gottcha" that does happen in the high tech world of computers and even the most sophisticated users, from government agencies to large private corporations, have been "burned" by it. Simply put the vendor (in this case Adobe) either goes out of business or changes the internal design of its proprietary database and you only then have access to your data for however long into the future that you can keep a running copy of the original software on your machines.
Don't laugh, and before you flame me for this review, I will mention two of the most famous examples of this happening: One is Western Digital Corp that used a third party vendor for years that supplied them with an ISAM engine database image backup system. WD sort of fell asleep at the switch and forgot to watch out for its vendors health. The vendor went out of business and WD was stuck with thousands of customers that could not get their backup data off of the WD drives that were affected. The second example is at NASA, that to this day has millions of image files from early space exploration that was encoded in a proprietary format that, inexplicably, over time, the programming code to decode was somehow lost or destroyed. Actually, there are many more examples, and the very nature of the programming world, it seems, is to be littered with the remains of old dead code systems that no one any longer uses, understands or has the time to bother with.
I only mention all this, just so that someone has told you. You are now informed, and if you ever do win this lottery you can not say that you did not know it could happen to you.
48 of 49 found the following review helpful:
Not Just for Professionals Nov 15, 2010
By Captain Latte
While I do have a nice DSLR that does shoot RAW, most of the photos I've taken over the past few years of our new daughter have been with a variety of Point and Shoot cameras (JPEGs). Like most new parents, we quickly accumulated thousands of JPEG images. Over the past few years, I've used iPhoto, Elements and Picasa, but for a variety of reasons (poor memory handling, feature limitations, etc.), became frustrated with each. So I was somewhat reluctant to pick up a copy of LR3 as I know many of the features are geared towards the professional photographer.
I've been working in LR3 for a few months now and really love it. Although I haven't gotten to my RAW collection yet, I've processed over 7000 images of my 2-year old daughter. I use LR3 mainly for its organizational features and while I have a copy of Photoshop, I have not used it once since I find the editing features in LR3 more than adequate for my needs. If you don't need to do serious image manipulation (in particular with special effects and alteration), LR3 is quite powerful and likely more than you will need. The White Balance, Exposure, Noise Reduction and Sharpening tools have actually saved many images that I originally had thought were throw-aways. Certainly, working with RAWs is where LR3 shines, but I wouldn't let that preclude you from using LR3 if all you have are JPEGs.
LR3 really shines with its handling of metadata and specially Keywording. The Keyword Sets and Suggestions are absolutely wonderful and save huge amounts of time. I only wish they allowed more than just 9 per set (which is apparently done for numeric keypad shortcuts). At least, you can use auto-complete when typing directly. LR3 does not include any sort of Facial Recognition engine, which has become quite common in other products like Picasa, iPhoto and even Elements. It's surprising that they brought the technology into Elements but not LR3. Personally, I find the Keywording to work quite well although it is not quite the same as there is no association with the keyword and actual face. Hopefully, LR4 will add this feature and allow for existing people Keywords to be linked in. But I suspect many professional photographers, who have a lot of influence on the product, may nix their interest in adding Facial Recognition to the product.
So I use iPhoto in conjunction with LR3 for a number of reasons. First off, LR3 does have a Print module, however, like many features it too is geared toward the professional who likely has a decent printer in-house. There are no options for 3rd party printing of Photo Books, Calendars, Cards, etc., that you have with iPhoto (and other products). I also prefer using iPhoto for Slide Shows (where I export a collection from LR3 to a folder to import into iPhoto). The Slide Show support in LR3 is quite limited. There is no control over the transitions between slides and you can only have one song at a time. Still, I use the LR3 impromptu slide shows against filtered metadata all the time with my daughter. I think slide shows is one area where the team can make big improvements with LR4. The last reason I use iPhoto is for publishing to MobileMe. LR3 does have a 3rd party plug-in that seems to work OK, but I figure safer to let the owner of MobileMe (Apple) do this for me with their own software.
LR3 does support video, but it is quite limited (don't expect to do much editing within LR3). You cannot actually watch a video from within LR3. When you want to play a video, it farms out to an external player. You can add metadata (Keywords) which is nice. I actually keep a copy of Picasa around just so I can rotate videos 90 degrees (the ones from cameras that don't get oriented properly). And you can't alter the Capture Time for a video like you can with an image (this is useful if you forgot to change camera for daylight savings or battery died and messed up internal date of camera).
I've also used the Web module for one website that I manage. The module comes with some preloaded templates that are either Flash or HTML-based. There are quite a few templates, but you'll soon discover that they are mostly the same physical layout with only difference being the colors. The templates are quite simple so not likely something you'd use for a nice website. But there are some nice 3rd party ones out there at reasonable prices. I should say that the Web module is still a little buggy and has hung LR a few times on me.
If you're somewhat new like me, I highly recommend getting George Jardine's videos on the Library and Develop modules. Scott Kelby's book The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 Book for Digital Photographers (Voices That Matter) is also excellent for intro and getting your workflow just right. It is worth spending time upfront deciding on how you want things organized (folder structure and location, folder naming, file naming, metadata, keywording, etc.). I also highly recommend Victoria Bampton's Adobe Lightroom 3 - The Missing FAQ - Real Answers to Real Questions asked by Lightroom Users book (and PDF).
Despite some of the short-comings, LR3 is truly a fabulous product and one that is just going to get better with time. I also think that it is a great product for folks who aren't necessarily professional or even serious photographers, but rather folks who just like a well organized collection of their photos and videos.
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