Lightroom 3 vs. Lightroom 4

[J. Fada]

I use Lightroom 3 with 600 meg scans and don't have any real problems, only the occasional slowdown but that is on a new Mac stuffed with ram. Odds are if you are running XP your machine is older and might not be so smooth.

I personally think you only need Photoshop for retouching dust or scratches. I also do some global corrections in PS but generally find it faster to do most adjustments in Lightroom. I used to use Photoshop for retouching color in LAB mode but when I went to CS4 the dynamic sliders stopped working making my method pretty much useless. It wasn't fixed in CS5 either so I haven't bothered to update. I am pretty tired of Adobe in general I should say. Today I noticed that the color shifts between the develop module and the Library module. No excuse for that. Adobe applications are getting to be bloatware in my opinion. I don't know why Adobe locks down the color space in Lightroom either. I want to have a choice and I want to have control.

[John Rodriguez]

Yes, if you have a machine with a good amount of RAM you'll have better luck, also if you have your files stored on a drive with a screaming fast interface (Thunderbolt, eSATA, or an internal drive) things will be faster.

As to PS not being needed, that's all a matter of perspective. There are a lot of things that you may want to do to a photograph that just can't be done in Lightroom, but you have to know that A) it's possible to do them and B) how to do them. Some examples -

- Apply Image lets you take any one of the ten channels (RGBCMYKLAB) and stuff it into one or more of the other, using all the usual blend modes. Now if your'e trying to build a nice contrast mask you get there using applies of specific channels and overlays to get there, using only the best attributes each channel has to offer. Then you can integrate the final result as a luminosity layer so color isn't affected. You'll wind up with a level of control that just isn't possible in Lightroom.

- Curves. Lightroom until LR4 has only given you a single curve for your entire image; LR4 gives you RGB, but you still only get one set for the image, you don't have any overlay modes for it, and you still only have RGB. If you want to apply different curves to different objects in your image, you're out of luck. If you need to make a color correction to only a certain part of your image and also make separate contrast adjustments at the same time, you're out of luck. With PS you use one set of curves for contrast and another for color, and you can have as many as you need for your image. Also, if you need to use the black channel of CMYK to enhance shadow detail with more nuance then is possible in RGB...SOL again.

- Blend modes. There's way to many uses for these to mention. One simple example though, you can apply your sharpening to only lighten or darken, based on the subject. IE, if you have a dark object, you may want to control the light halos separately from the dark ones. This will allow you greater sharpening overall because you can back off in areas where it would otherwise be objectional. Also, there's Blend If, which allows you to apply adjustments only if certain channel conditions exist - say if the sky is a certain shade of blue, or only to dark areas etc.

Those are just scratching the surface. The point is, there's a lot more tools to get your photographs where you want them with PS, but you need to know where you want your image to go, then you need to know what tools can get you there.

[venchka]

Funny. It's good to be dumb and cheap.
Epson 1680 scanner
Lightroom 3.6
LR/Enfuse exposure and focus stacking Lightroom plug in, donationware
Microsoft ICE freeware
Windows XP
Works for everything I throw at it. 35mm, 6x6, 6x7 and 4x5. Oh, and Canon RAW files.

Wayne