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  • Welcome to the new site. Here's a thread about the update where you can post your feedback, ask questions or spot those nasty bugs!

Adobe Lightroom Beta for Windows has (finally) arrived!

Sid Jervis

pro member
There have been a few reports of LR not liking network drives (and then failing to start), but it is early days yet.
 

Daniel Harrison

pro member
Well after finally playing with this program for a while I think I have got a list of pros and cons.

Firstly I really like the library feature, and I like the adjustments avaliable as well. The curve panel could be better, no ability to move the curve manually or to change indiviual colours. (RGB)

Secondly, coming from RSP I hate the raw converter. It is ridiculasly slow and would take me 10x longer to work on my images and I am not exagerating. It is way way to slow. Untill this is sorted out I think I will continue to use RSP.
 

John_Nevill

New member
Here’s my initial take on LR-W b3 after an hours use!.

1) It's reasonably fast but I run a dual core PC with 2Gb ram, so any performance issue may not be as noticeable. I would like to see how it runs on a lower spec PC, it may well struggle.

2) The interface is interesting and some simple commands like exporting images are too embedded in the menus, I’d prefer one button to output within the development module, similar to the print module.

3) The “working…” message has a mind of its own! It sometimes appears when you have done nothing?

4) I would like to see the image filename on the main develop panel rather than have a thumbnail view open, this enables one to distinguish between image types while editing.

5) Support for 3rd party camera and monitor ICC profiles, not just ACR or windows default.

6) Lens correction to include barrel and pin cushion adjustment.

7) Image watermarking - Covert or overlay support.

8) Support for PS plug-ins

9) No reset on individual develop controls (tone etc) only on the crop control, this is real pain as you have to reset all and lose other edits. I also share Daniel's concerns on the curve panel.

10) History (develop) is a misleading term, these are really setting's snapshots. Also if you hit the delete tag there should be a confirmation dialogue. I wiped out a few all too easy and i've yet to get them back!

11) Printing preview issue (but that’s known about)

All in all I was quite impressed with it, obviously most of these issues will be addressed in subsequent releases, but as a beta3, it’s quite stable on RAW, but a little shaky on other formats. Its crashed a few times on jpeg collections

I now look forward to the beta 4 and subsequent free formal release (RSP user upgrade) and will carry on tinkering with it, but probably won’t use it in earnest.
 

Ray West

New member
Hi John,

Thanks for your report, just one note

3) The “working…” message has a mind of its own! It sometimes appears when you have done nothing?

It may be that the sw is performing some background task, on an internal timer basis - e.g. saving the least used memory to hdd, say. If nothing else, it is busy displaying the 'busy message'

Best wishes,

Ray
 

Richard McNeil

New member
I have a 3GHz P4 laptop with 512 MB of memory. It is horribly slow (read unusable). I know my memory does not meet the 700MB minimum requirement, but C1, Imatch and CS2 run fine with now problems! I will try Beta 4 when it comes out but for now it is being uninstalled.
 

Daniel_Hyams

New member
I agree, Richard (about the slowness) but remember that in the readme, they say that "their performance goals have not yet been met", or something like that. This is a politically correct way of saying that it's slow, but they are working on it.

That having been said, I didn't think it would be *that* slow. I'm hoping that this is an unoptimized, debug build.
 

Frank Werner

New member
what I miss most compared with RSP/C1 are any kind keyboard shorcuts like Ctrl + + / - for exposure corrections. To be able to correct a bunch of pictures with keys is really important for me. As if you don's shoot in controlled settings you have a lot of exposure corrections by 1/5 - 1/2 stop and with keys its much easier to go through 100 pictures and do that as sliding slider with the mouse.

Yes and slow it is. On myhlon X2 4400 with a Raid1 Array of 2 Western Digital Raptors, Lightroom needed about 45 minutes to build previews of a directory with 200 pics.

Frank
 

Andreas Kanon

New member
Lightroom Beta 3 for windows is one tedious piece of software to try and work with.
I have given it a honest try to see if i missed the advantages of it vs RSP (which i have been using since released).

My conclusion is that Lightroom will never be able to fill the void of RSP.
The workflow is way to tedious and cumbersome.

To work with multiple pictures and compare and batch convert...it's not even in the same ballpark.
LR is more designed towards people who shoot few photos and fiddle alot with them instead of those who take hundreds of pictures and maybe pic 2 or 3 out of those.

Right now LR feels more like a developers playground where they try and cram in as much functionality and totally forgott about the essentials that Pixmantec managed to capture so well in RSP.
I know this may seem like a whiny post but i really had high hopes that Adobe would present a really great product.
Unfortunately that doesn't seem to be the case.
 

Don Lashier

New member
A.Kanon said:
LR is more designed towards people who shoot few photos and fiddle alot with them instead of those who take hundreds of pictures and maybe pic 2 or 3 out of those.
Being of the latter type this does not bode well for me. Perhaps I won't even waste time evaluating it versus my current satisfaction with C1 workflow. Somehow or other Adobe has never understood workflow requirements, but perhaps they finally recognized this and that's why they bought the talents of someone who does.

- DL
 

Dierk Haasis

pro member
A.Kanon said:
Right now LR feels more like a developers playground where they try and cram in as much functionality and totally forgott about the essentials that Pixmantec managed to [...]

Exactly what it currently is.

I am not as disappointed by LR as you are, actually I am not disappointed at all. But then, I haven't tried it yet on hundreds of photos because iLR is neither production-ready nor fast enough (which is stated explicitly in the release notes).

As Jeff Schewe wrote in the Adobe forum today or last night (I paraphrase): Tell the developers what you want. Make it specific, something like "it should be RSP" or "I don't like the work-flow" are not of help.

If RS meets your needs you don't have to change to another porgram until you exchange your camera for a non-supported model.
 

Andreas Kanon

New member
Dierk Haasis said:
Exactly what it currently is.

I am not as disappointed by LR as you are, actually I am not disappointed at all. But then, I haven't tried it yet on hundreds of photos because iLR is neither production-ready nor fast enough (which is stated explicitly in the release notes).

As Jeff Schewe wrote in the Adobe forum today or last night (I paraphrase): Tell the developers what you want. Make it specific, something like "it should be RSP" or "I don't like the work-flow" are not of help.

If RS meets your needs you don't have to change to another porgram until you exchange your camera for a non-supported model.

Hi Dierk,

I am fully aware of it being a beta and just a taste n feel thing at the moment.
Since Adobe bought Pixmantec the things i would have liked implemented in RSP will not be adressed so i will have to start looking for options and since LR 1.0 will be free for current RSP users it only fell naturally to try it out.

I do try and give constructive feedback on exactly what i am missing in LR , you might see me as Marsliden on the LR forums.

But i am dissapointed in the layout and workflow of LR in its current incarnation.
 

Tom Yi

New member
I haven't tried LR, but being a RSP user, I don't think I'll be liking the LR, as it's interface seems less intuitive and slower than RSP.

Hope the production version is better, but I don't think I"ll be holding my breath.
 

Michael Tapes

OPF Administrator/Moderator
Daniel_Hyams said:
That having been said, I didn't think it would be *that* slow. I'm hoping that this is an unoptimized, debug build.

You should consider it an advanced preview. The "beta" moniker is not accurate according to normal software standards. So treat it as an advanced preview of the current engineering state. Although it has advanced quote a bit since the Windows release. Watch for preview 4, to begin to evaluate performance from a more reasonable perspective.
 

Andreas Kanon

New member
Michael Tapes said:
You should consider it an advanced preview. The "beta" moniker is not accurate according to normal software standards. So treat it as an advanced preview of the current engineering state. Although it has advanced quote a bit since the Windows release. Watch for preview 4, to begin to evaluate performance from a more reasonable perspective.

Will the preview 4 allow for more RSP like workflow with tree like structure instead of the abstract relation between shoot (developed picture) and where it is physically on the disk?

That is my single biggest gripe about LR.
I already have my pictures organized on the disk in a way i am comfortable with.
I do not want the application to now try and add another layer ontop of that.
 

Gary Ayala

New member
Lightroom

Speaking of Lightroom ... I've had the PC version for a week or so ... and ... mmmhh ... it's no big deal ... IMO (had to qualify my statement). Allbeit, I haven't used it all that much, but it delivers similar results as DPP or RSP or ACR with no real advantage in user interface or user time. Plus I don't like the tiny controls. Anybody else try Lightroom?
 

Dierk Haasis

pro member
Andreas Kanon said:
I already have my pictures organized on the disk in a way i am comfortable with.
I do not want the application to now try and add another layer ontop of that.

Just import with the "Folder" setting and LR reflects your directory structure.

Although I use MediaPro for changes to the directory - move, copy, folder creation - when it comes to my photos, technically it is not such a good idea. Luckily it works quite well with most applications and Windows.

I have still not quite understood why so many people get upset by an additional management possibility. It is not like you lose the directory structure, nor is the DOS-style hierarchical system very efficient, let alone flexible. Granted, currently LR lacks a bit in DAM capabilities but what it does (and pretends to do) it does very well.

It has to be said over and over again s, so it seems, that LR is more than a one-task application. It will surely take some time till it is "complete", but it is already rather well adapted to a (modern) photography work-flow. Which makes it quite uncomfortable at first because we've adapted ourselves to the sub-optimal work-flow imposed by computers.

There's two more reasons in getting comfortable with LR, one deep in our psychology, the other rather superficial:

- LR must be bad because it comes from a software giant - which has squashed a competitor offering a superb program*
- LR is an all-in-one show, not the typical "modular" work-flow we are used to.

The second claim needs some explanation. The technical base of LR is modular, which was even translated into the UI, but it is very different from the way we usually experience "modules". In the past we first opened a download program, i.e. Windows Explorer, having one UI. Then wen went to a RAW converter with another UI. After making our global corrections we went over to Photoshop for local corrections and composites - another UI. This goes on to printing, Web etc. Even if, like PS, some of the applications had been incorporated into one program, the UIs and handling was quite different (think Adobe's abysmal print engine, which was conceived for pre-press work; think ImageReady, or the Web gallery module).

Perhaps this article will help a bit about getting to grips with LR (it's not particularly about Adobe's program but ...).




*Obvious nonsense as I've claimed a few times already (come on, pixmantec a competitor to Adobe? Only someone having not the faintest notion how markets work can say that.)
 

Harvey Moore

New member
Dierk,

I agree with your analysis of the Lightroom situation entirely.

I have been using it since it was available for download, and I am finding the raw conversions to be excellent, and with a good set of adjustments. About ten of the one hundred or so images that I processed had to be opened in CS2 for more extensive editing, layers, curves, local contrast enhancement etc.

I have seen a lot of comments about Pixmantec being "gobbled up" by Adobe, but I have seen nothing around the web about who approached who. It is possible that the guys at Pixmantec approached Adobe first.

harvey
 

Andreas Kanon

New member
Dierk,

I have about 40.000 photos on my harddrive that i can keep track of perfectly as is.
Now given the fact that i have to import all my folders one by one doesn't give me as a user a good comfortlevel.
Why is it that i can't use that structure without importing it ?
Since LR is of a modular structure (which most progams are by nature) why can't there be a module that handles direct DOS file structure.

Just because it is new doesn't automatically mean it is better.

There is alot that i do like about LR nor do i hold any grudge against Pixmantec or Adobe for the merger.
But i do want a more flexible solution.

RSP did (and still do) a wonderfull job at sending developed photos to PS (in my case) quick and without much input work needed from me as a user.

So how can LR become better.

1. Offer an alternative to import pictures and alow the user the option to use files in current structure on the HD.
How will the DAM solution handle a crashed HD and replaced file structures to correlate to?
At least if i mirror my directory structure onto one or more different harddrives the sidecar file solution still works.

2. Allow easier import of multiple directory structures without having to specify which pictures from which location and time to import. If i am to use LR i want a swift way to get my pictures into LR with a minimum of manual steps, simple as that.

3. Add the double click feature on sliders so they reset to the default value. Right now all i can do is to reset all at once to default.

4. Allow the user to select a default or user named subdirectory to be created under the same structure from which the raw files where imported from.
Example:
c:\date-mypictures\developed
 
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