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Lightroom 4 Public Beta posted

cam

Active member
i got burned a few years back (hard drive failure when i was transferring all my images to Aperture) and haven't tried to manage them properly since.

my new year's resolution was to finally be grown up and try to wrangle all my images again (they are now backed up over duplicate drives) and i decided to use Lightroom and am just getting my head around it.

should i do this now in 3 or wait for 4 to officially come out?

can i trust doing it in 4?

for the record, C1 is still my choice of RAW processor for Leica images but i am enjoying LR for the X100... and, yes, even after futzing with LR, i still prefer the layer capabilities of CS3. i am too stubborn and set in my ways.

Lightroom is really more for image management and printing (so i'm really excited about the SoftProof function!).

TIA
 

dogstarnyc

Member
Go ahead and get going on LR3 it's stable and solid, LR4 has great new things but is a beta so already glitches are coming to the fore.... get yourself engrossed in LR3 and then when and if you upgrade to 4 it will be fairly painless and hopefully you won't lose work or files...

S
 

dogstarnyc

Member
Been playing with LR4beta for 30 mins or so...

Is it me or is the new 2012 processing engine so good it's unreal....?

The leap from the 2003 to the 2010 engine was quantum but this... wow...!

For example, files from my P25 back put through the 2012 processing engine in LR4 beta make them look like P45 files.... (it's early in the day and I haven't been drinking..)

So far this upgrade of lightroom has been very intelligent, some very very good new tools and ideas to help your workflow and Adobe have listened to users requests...

Great stuff...

Steve
 

Terry

New member
Cam - do it in LR 3 because there will be the proper upgrade path. Sometimes the catalogues from the betas don't go seamlessly to the new version.
 

cam

Active member
thank you, Steve and Terry.

i logically knew that was the right thing to do, but i was really really hoping someone would tell me to wait until LR 4 came out... i'm not a procrastinator, i'm really not :ROTFL:

i got the Fuji back this morning so it will be fun to test the new beta and soft-proofing out. i'm really interested to see how it works with b/w images!
 

Diane B

New member
Use LR 3 for now. Lots of good stuff out there in tutes, etc and Martin Evening's books are great. I'm a very very long time user of PS but have used LR since beta 1. So many people don't realize its possibilities. If you like PS too, then do roundtrips to PS from LR. That allows you to use all of PS (layers, actions, plugins, etc) and save to LR and your database is complete. I do this all the time.

Being able to use some plugins directly from LR is handy too, for instance Nik plugins.

Diane

i got burned a few years back (hard drive failure when i was transferring all my images to Aperture) and haven't tried to manage them properly since.

my new year's resolution was to finally be grown up and try to wrangle all my images again (they are now backed up over duplicate drives) and i decided to use Lightroom and am just getting my head around it.

should i do this now in 3 or wait for 4 to officially come out?

can i trust doing it in 4?

for the record, C1 is still my choice of RAW processor for Leica images but i am enjoying LR for the X100... and, yes, even after futzing with LR, i still prefer the layer capabilities of CS3. i am too stubborn and set in my ways.

Lightroom is really more for image management and printing (so i'm really excited about the SoftProof function!).

TIA
 

greypilgrim

New member
Looking forward to checking it out.

I am a little worried that they are "dumbing it down" on the exposure/brightness/fill sliders all becoming one slider because the concept was hard for people to handle in LR3...

Also a little worried about making the medium tone curve the linear tone curve (baking it in according to what I read). I tend to first set everything to flat and then adjust to what I want.

So, while excited about some of the new features, I am little anxious about the possibility of a general direction of dumbing things down...

A little time will tell, I am sure :). And to be fair, they haven't messed me up going from 1 to 2 or 2 to 3, so there is hope.

Doug
 

cam

Active member
Diane, thank you. i am still feeling my way around... i'm still using CS3 and have been manually exporting and importing as i thought it wasn't possible/compatible to do roundrips -- am i wrong? and i have the Nik plug-ins that will work in LR too, just haven't used them yet -- it is all so alien to me :eek:

Cam,

We all need to keep the DAM concepts to the fore...to easy to just start dumping files into folders and playing.

Here are a few thoughts from George Jardine on filenames and DAM.

http://mulita.com/blog/
absolutely spot on! i really needed that as i have been going back and forth about how i am going to do this... thank you so much, Bob! i've been obsessing over this for days...

all of my folders are named when i import them onto the computer and would like to keep them the same in LR... for instance, i do year.month.day and then keywords and what lens was used (a throw back from my Epson days when it didn't record that data).

my question here, is will LR accept characters like a period (".") or is that considered illegal? (i'm on a mac and sometimes groan when i have to revert back to PC protocol in Adobe products when it's for my own personal use.)


***********
and i just saw what Doug wrote -- no more separate sliders? :( i've grown very fond of fill!
 

robertwright

New member
if you don't opt for the 2012 process version do you get the old sliders back for exposure, brightness, contrast, fill and blacks?

I am not liking the new regime - why change such basic ideas?
 

cam

Active member
Looking forward to checking it out.

I am a little worried that they are "dumbing it down" on the exposure/brightness/fill sliders all becoming one slider because the concept was hard for people to handle in LR3...

Also a little worried about making the medium tone curve the linear tone curve (baking it in according to what I read). I tend to first set everything to flat and then adjust to what I want.

So, while excited about some of the new features, I am little anxious about the possibility of a general direction of dumbing things down...

A little time will tell, I am sure :). And to be fair, they haven't messed me up going from 1 to 2 or 2 to 3, so there is hope.

Doug
just played around with an image... really don't like how they dumbed those sliders down -- AT ALL!

if they don't give you an option to use those (couldn't they have an advanced mode or something?), this may kill wanting to use LR for any of my RAW processing... sigh.

i will play some more and do some small prints but i'm none too happy... i like having control!
 

Diane B

New member
Cam. I use CS3 also (after many years of upgrading I settled to this). You just set up the external editor in your preferences and when you right click over image it brings up 'edit in' and you just choose the CS3. Simple. It will create a tiff file beside the raw, open in PS and you can do whatever you wish in PS, "save as" and it saves th PS edits.

I'll be back to add more. Lunch just came LOL.

I have my folders set up like you on external drives so first I named each drive (one for most every year since 2000 until last few years with much larger drives) otherwise LR gets confused if you don't name them (this is for PC--have no idea for Mac). Then I import 'where they are'. I'm not in front of computer so not sure of wording but that's what you want and then folder order is maintained. I don't use periods so will have to check LOL. You'd think I'd know but even things have changed over the years I seem to stick to old conventions.

Diane

Diane, thank you. i am still feeling my way around... i'm still using CS3 and have been manually exporting and importing as i thought it wasn't possible/compatible to do roundrips -- am i wrong? and i have the Nik plug-ins that will work in LR too, just haven't used them yet -- it is all so alien to me :eek:


absolutely spot on! i really needed that as i have been going back and forth about how i am going to do this... thank you so much, Bob! i've been obsessing over this for days...

all of my folders are named when i import them onto the computer and would like to keep them the same in LR... for instance, i do year.month.day and then keywords and what lens was used (a throw back from my Epson days when it didn't record that data).

my question here, is will LR accept characters like a period (".") or is that considered illegal? (i'm on a mac and sometimes groan when i have to revert back to PC protocol in Adobe products when it's for my own personal use.)


***********
and i just saw what Doug wrote -- no more separate sliders? :( i've grown very fond of fill!
 
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