minning.de - Stefan Minning: CG Artist and Developer

Ever since Adobe announced their new photo man­age­ment soft­ware Light­room, I’ve been look­ing for­ward to play­ing with it. Now I’m by no means a pro­fes­sional pho­tog­ra­pher, but I do enjoy tak­ing pho­tos here and there and espe­cially edit­ing them after­wards. For cat­a­loging I’ve used Google’s free Picasa until now — Picasa is also what I use to man­age my gar­gan­tuan tex­ture library and I’ll be try­ing Light­room from the same angle as well.
So here’s a mini-​​review of Light­room from the per­spec­tive of a CG Artist.

The first thing I noticed after installing and launch­ing the soft­ware is that it sports a pretty slick new look — which, unfor­tu­nately, and not unlike Adobe’s other offer­ings of late (CS2 suite, I’m look­ing at you), feels extremely slug­gish to use and lags quite a bit. The soft­ware takes sev­eral sec­onds to react to any user input, even the sil­li­est things like select­ing images or open­ing menus lag notice­ably and come with an insane amount of HD rat­tling. Odd. For some rea­son, scrolling pan­els using the mouse wheel doesn’t work either. The soft­ware is marked as beta, so I’ll give them the ben­e­fit of doubt, hop­ing they might fix these issues before final release.

On to test­ing the fea­tures: Light­room is split into 4 mod­ules: Library, Develop, Slideshow and Print. Of these, only the Library and Develop are impor­tant to me, so I’m leav­ing the oth­ers out of this review.

My first step then was to import my library of around 5000 pho­tos and just as many tex­tures in Lightroom’s library. The import pro­ce­dure is pain­less and quick, even let­ting you use the main inter­face in the mean­time to fol­low the progress made.
After a few min­utes of pro­cess­ing, the disk finally stopped rat­tling and it was safe to assume the soft­ware had com­pleted import­ing my images. It turned out that Light­room choked mid­way on some extra large tex­tures, but then con­tin­ued pro­cess­ing with­out user intervention.

The left pane on the screen had now filled with my albums con­tain­ing pho­tos and tex­tures. Select­ing an album brings for­ward a thumb­nail view in the main part of the screen as well as a “Film strip” view of the same images in the bot­tom area. View­ing and select­ing images is straight­for­ward and adding them to a “Quick Col­lec­tion” for later use is very intu­itive — unlike Picasa, Light­room can also remem­ber selec­tions of images from mul­ti­ple albums, which makes the fea­ture much more intuitive.

A fea­ture I use often is tag­ging tex­tures with key­words, so that I must only enter “Peb­ble Stones from Gobi desert” when look­ing for that spe­cific type of tex­ture to have the selec­tion nar­rowed down to all tex­tures pre­vi­ously tagged with that key­word. Tag­ging mul­ti­ple images is sim­ple enough, as is find­ing the tagged images either through the Search fea­ture or the vir­tual albums that are auto­mat­i­cally cre­ated for each key­word — very nice!
View­ing the images can be done either one by one or in a “Com­pare” mode where selected images a aligned in a grid on screen to facil­i­tate the selec­tion of the best. This too strikes me as very useful.

Now it’s time to test the image edit­ing fea­tures by switch­ing to the Develop mod­ule. The right side of this screen fea­tures a vast array of com­mands to adjust color, lens and cam­era cal­i­bra­tion via a plethora of slid­ers and but­tons.
The Before/​After view is immensely use­ful and very clever: The orig­i­nal image is dis­played next to the adjusted one, so the user always knows exactly what he’s doing and can fine-​​tune any adjustments.

This is clearly more than Picasa’s sim­ple pre­sets and the clumsy “I’m feel­ing lucky” but­ton have to offer and the amount of con­trol you get is very sat­is­fy­ing. Less sat­is­fy­ing is the notice­able lag when mov­ing the slid­ers around: Any changes made take a while to process, the end of which is made known by the dis­ap­pear­ing of the “Work­ing” notice atop of the pho­to­graph.
One might argue that my PC is not the newest, but then again any changes made to the very same images in Picasa or Pho­to­shop 7 appear instan­ta­neously, so my age-​​ridden com­puter is not the only one to blame here.

While all of these adjust­ments work very well and the qual­ity leaves noth­ing to be desired, my biggest gripe with the Develop mod­ule is that there is no con­trol over the area of the adjust­ments made. Where in Pho­to­shop you could use masks or selec­tions to spec­ify areas to fil­ter, in Light­room it’s all or noth­ing.
In most cases if you’re doing advanced edit­ing you’ll be doing it in Pho­to­shop any­way, so I’m not quite sure why Adobe chose to offer all of these adjust­ment com­mands if there’s no way to con­trol them properly.

All in all I think Adobe is on the right track. If they can some­how get the inter­face respon­sive­ness up to par with their older soft­ware or even Picasa, Light­room will prob­a­bly become my photo/​texture man­ager of choice. That is, if the price is right — you can’t beat free, after all.

For now, I’m stick­ing with Picasa, though.