Adobe Lightroom.

[Mac Medic]

I shoot in camera RAW with my D50 and was using the adobe bridge camera RAW plugin for editing, that was, until Apple released Aperture.

http://www.apple.com/aperture/
http://www.apple.com/aperture/resources/tutorial/

Aperture is a revolution in camera raw workflow, making it as easy as editing jpeg images. The interface, typically Apple, is near perfect and unlike any other application out there. Unfortunately that doesn't make up for the poor performance. My dual G5 is no slouch, and with 2gig ram it handles 16mb+ raw (over 100mb in memory) images with ease and spits them out flawlessly, well, it did in Adobe Bridge! Aperture is plagued with performance problems. Granted it’s primarily because the program leverages Apple’s core image technology for it’s non destructive editing and my lowly 128mb Nvidia card could do with an upgrade but there are also other issues at work here I’m sure as my card is perfectly fine rendering effects in real time in Final Cut Pro. So it’s been a bitter sweet experience, a seemingly perfect workflow application, an almost perfect interface, organization and editing features that put Adobe Bridge to shame, and just bloody slow at it all!

All that changed earlier this week when Abobe released a free Beta of it’s new “Lightroom” application, their answer to Aperture. Granted, it doesn’t have the apple flair or some of the features of Aperture, but damn if it isn’t fast! The interface is actually very good, a complete departure for anyone familiar with Adobe’s traditional floating workspace, it’s not as customizable as the floating workspace but it does work very well, it has definite hints of macromedia in the interface so it seems the merger was a good thing. It is missing a few of the features that Aperture has but it is also just a Beta release so I’m sure the features will appear in time, and did I mention it’s fast! It has a few editing features (all non-destructive in both apps by the way) that are glaringly absent in aperture, like the tone-curve, that IMHO are indispensable. The lights dim and lights feature that dims/blacks out the control panels leaving just your images visible is a stroke of genius and the loupe is just damn fast! Yes, it’s fast. It’s organization features are better than Aperture while it’s compare and select features are comparable, just faster!. Lightroom’s web galleries aren’t as elegant as the Apple ones, unless you export a Flash gallery, Flash is embedded in the program and makes some of the nicest web slideshow galleries I have ever seen. All this in an 8mb download!

It’s only available on the Mac right now but a windows version is on the way, so if you shoot RAW and have access to a Mac download lightroom and try it out, you’ll be happy you did.

I will most certainly be buying this to replace Aperture when it goes gold. Oh yeah, it’s fast.

http://labs.macromedia.com/technologies/lightroom/
http://www.digitalcamerainfo.com/con...room-Beta-.htm


Sorry if this is in the wrong place but I really don't consider this an actual review.

[Kov-Ice]

Mac, why do you shoot in RAW format? What's the major benefit?

[Mac Medic]

When you shoot in jpeg about 30%-50% (often more depending on the subject) of the image data is discarded by the in camera compression, also the camera applies saturation/noise reduction/sharpening to the image. These are thing I prefer to have control over in post processing so I use RAW (or digital negative) which is a true reproduction of what the image sensor captures without any in camera processing or compression. Also RAW workflow is true non destructive editing, unlike jpeg which loses image data with each file generation.