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Hope you all had an amazing Christmas day and you are enjoying all your special gifts. James, cannot wait to see what you create with your new toy. Jim, I am curious how well you like Lightroom.

I think today I will spend the day reading one of my gift books "I Remember Nothing" = Okay not photo related but humor can make it easier to read the how to manuals!



Hi Peggy!

I'm not a pro shooter -- in fact my goal is to some day work my way up to being an adequately skilled amateur -- so my comments come from that perspective.

I haven't started the process of reorganizing and re-cataloging my images in Lightroom yet, but I have been playing with it a bit. I've also started working my way through Scott Kelby's book and have been watching several of the myriad of online tutorials.

So far, I've found a lot that I like about it. As I said in my post above, up to now, I had been using Elements 6 for all of my processing, organizing, and viewing images. I have been shooting RAW + highest quality jpegs, but I had yet to master the art of post processing RAW files, so I would end up doing minimal, if any, adjustments to the jpegs and then saving the edited version either in a version set with the original or as a copy. Mostly shadow/highlights adjustments, some contrast & saturation adjustments, & occasional color correction. Was never able to do any effective sharpening or noise reduction.

Here's what I like so far:

The overall design and organization of LR seems to facilitate a systematic work flow approach to processing images.

The easy to use presets and ability to use them to make global adjustments to all images on import and/or select a batch of images and have the same adjustments made to all of them. Like Ty indicated in the Lightroom vs. CS5 thread, up to now, I have been laboriously tweeking jpegs one at a time.

The noise reduction in LR is much easier and more effective.

In the "Organize" module of Elements 6, it would show each image twice -- RAW and JPEG. With LR you just see it once.

It integrates well with Elements 6.

For the time being, it is safe to say that I expect it to have a dramatic impact on the way I shoot and process images. For one thing, I will probably stop shooting RAW + JPEG and just shoot RAW. I also plan to follow Roman's lead and sign up for a year's worth of access to Kelby online training.

Jim