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|| SportsShooter.com: Member Message Board
Lightroom for PJ staff use?
Robert Scheer, Photographer
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Indianapolis | IN | USA | Posted: 3:38 PM on 09.08.10 |
->> Hi gang,
This is aimed primarily at newspaper photo staffs:
I'm curious how many newspaper photo departments are using Lightroom as staff-issued software.
On my staff, one of our photographers is pushing hard to have everyone switch over to Lightroom from Photomechanic, which we've been using for, well, forever.
It's very unscientific, but what program is your photo staff using for as its "light table?" And, what are the pros/cons.
Thanks! |
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Les Stukenberg, Photographer, Photo Editor
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Prescott Valley | AZ | USA | Posted: 4:00 PM on 09.08.10 |
->> Robert,
We are still using Photo Mechanic and Photoshop, mostly because of our familiarity of the process. I have tried using Lightroom as well as Aperture for my personal business as well as a potential for staff usage but have not found the ease of use that familiarity brings. |
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James Brosher, Student/Intern, Photographer
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Austin | TX | United States | Posted: 4:16 PM on 09.08.10 |
| ->> For what it's worth, every internship I've had we've used Photomechanic. Personally, I use Photomechanic as a light table and Lightroom as an archive. Lightroom is great for my personal use as a software equivalent to Merlin or DC5. |
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Butch Miller, Photographer
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Lock Haven | PA | USA | Posted: 4:51 PM on 09.08.10 |
->> While I am a big fan of LR in general ... currently .... nothing beats the speed and simplicity of Photo Mechanic for PJ work.
You can cull and caption an entire shoot in less time that it would take to import and build previews in LR .... this is assuming that you are shooting RAW of course .... if you shoot jpeg ... there's little difference ....
Seems to me the biggest hurdle would be convincing "the powers that be" of a budget expenditure for as many LR licenses as you would need for your staff ... when considering how publications are hurting from an economic standpoint ... |
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AJ Mast, Photographer, Photo Editor
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Indianapolis | IN | USA | Posted: 4:58 PM on 09.08.10 |
| ->> It only took 6 years for you guys to get updated licenses of Photo Mechanic, so maybe in 6 years light room will match PM. It is important to plan for the future. |
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Robert Scheer, Photographer
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Indianapolis | IN | USA | Posted: 5:14 PM on 09.08.10 |
| ->> Where's that rolling eye emoticon? ;) |
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Israel Shirk, Photographer, Assistant
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Boise | ID | US | Posted: 5:27 PM on 09.08.10 |
->> Lightroom is great if you have time to spare, I use it for wedding and portrait stuff, but wouldn't consider it for PJ. It's waaaaaaaaaay too slow when deadlines are looming.
When I do use it, I download after a shoot and let it crunch full-size previews while I'm off doing something else. If you do end up using it, make sure you have it set up to write into the XMP sidecars and not just its own database. A single point of failure can make for a very bad day every once in a while :) |
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Jack Kurtz, Photographer
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Phoenix | AZ | United States | Posted: 5:42 PM on 09.08.10 |
->> I am a huge fan of Lightroom. I like its organizational tools and the captioning and raw processing tools are very, very good. The localized corrections (burning & dodging, vignetting and graduated filters) are outstanding.
I've been using LR since vers 1 (actually since the first beta of vers 1) but it took awhile for me to migrate my workflow away from PhotoMechanic/Photoshop to LR. But once I did there was no looking back.
LR is quite a bit slower than PM, which is an issue for night sports or other tight deadlines but aside from that I think it's great. I haven't used Photoshop to process daily work in years. |
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N. Scott Trimble, Photographer
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Lake Oswego | OR | USA | Posted: 5:50 PM on 09.08.10 |
->> There are tricks to making Lightroom work faster, One is I make a rapid catalog of JPEGS if I shoot raw and jpeg for fast (ie night sports deadline) and can usually caption and select almost as fast as Mechanic and crank them out on the wire, then reimport the RAWs when I am finished for archive. You can also jigger the image preview and a few other things to speed things up if you want to do a RAW only import. The trick is to follow a good consistent workflow method like the one D65 proposes.
www.d65.com |
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Derek Montgomery, Photographer
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Duluth | MN | USA | Posted: 6:56 PM on 09.08.10 |
| ->> Lightroom is good when you have time to spend with your images. For something on the fly when time is critical and you have to meet a deadline, Photo Mechanic is still the way to go. Lightroom is getting faster, but I still think Photo Mechanic is a little more intuitive when it comes to issues of speed. |
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David Minton, Photographer, Student/Intern
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Denton | TX | USA | Posted: 6:58 PM on 09.08.10 |
| ->> Lightroom? I'm still stuck with Photo Mechanic 3.1! |
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Dave Einsel, Photographer, Photo Editor
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Houston | TX | United States | Posted: 7:39 PM on 09.08.10 |
->> PhotoMechanic is a browser and a great one. The fastest I know.
Lightroom is first and foremost an image processing program that also creates catalogs for archiving, etc.
I use both. PhotoMechanic to edit and caption. Lightroom to process.
Once selects are made in PhotoMechanic, they still have to be processed. I save selects with general IPTC to an "Edit" folder, import that into Lightroom, process and export to a "Send" folder, tweek final captions and send.
It may sound like extra steps but the ability to batch process several images rather than open, tone, crop and save each one in PhotoShop is an advantage for me.
I suspect Aperture could be used the same way.
At the end of the day, they are just hammers and wrenches. Use what works best for the way your brain is wired. |
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Thomas Boyd, Photographer
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Portland | OR | USA | Posted: 9:52 PM on 09.08.10 |
->> At The Oregonian we are transitioning over to Aperture from a PM/PS workflow.
With new cameras and being forced to buy a vey expensive CS5 version of Photoshop, they decided Aperture was a better value and was much faster.
Some staffers tested LR and weren't that excited about it. I've been using Aperture for years and have established a very fast deadline workflow. Aperture 3 is extra fast with it's import features and ability to make local adjustments.
I don't think there was one person on staff that thought buying CS5 was a good idea. With Aperture we can still use CS3 if we need to by round tripping.
For me, the real time savings with both Aperture and Lightroom is from not having to make adjustments in PS. If you are a photographer that just needs to send photos without making adjustments PM is the way to go. But, that's not us. We need to make adjustments.
We'll still use PM for some IPTC duties and it's high-powered ftp client feature.
There's no better way to ftp photos than PM and it does things with IPTC that no other app will do. PM is king when it comes to these functions. |
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Mike Huffstatler, Photographer, Assistant
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Rancho Cucamonga | Ca | United States | Posted: 10:06 PM on 09.08.10 |
->> I had a conversation with a couple folks last week about just this topic. It seems there is a use for both PM and LR and possibly PS if your work needs it.
--Use PM for the speed of ingest and initial selects.
--Move the selects (only) into PS
--Complete any caption/edit/presets/whatever in LR (much of the capioning might already be done in PM)
--Move into PS only if needed (likely not in a journalism usage model)
--Use the powerful export tools of LR to apply to just about any format required. all in a non-destructive manner.
Obviosuly some fine tuning needed here and your results may vary. This was just the concensus we reached at a very high level. |
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Robert Scheer, Photographer
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Indianapolis | IN | USA | Posted: 11:24 PM on 09.08.10 |
->> Thomas, thanks for bringing up Aperture. It has fans for sure. I messed around with it a couple of years ago, and liked it a lot.
Mike and others, thanks for your ideas.
It seems as if that within PJ staffers, there are subsets developing.
1. You do a LOT of sports, don't need much more than a simple crop and tone, and prefer the quick captioning, transmitting ease of PM.
2. Do more food/illustrations/set up portraits and prefer the tweaks that LR/Aperture provides.
3. Generalists (many of us) who are split. |
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Dave Einsel, Photographer, Photo Editor
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Mike Huffstatler, Photographer, Assistant
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Rancho Cucamonga | Ca | United States | Posted: 1:39 AM on 09.09.10 |
->> I just noticed an error on my note. Step 2 should have said to move the selects into LR not PS.
Sorry for any confusion there |
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Thomas Boyd, Photographer
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Portland | OR | USA | Posted: 3:01 AM on 09.09.10 |
->> Robert:
Everyone on our staff shoots more than just sports. However, I shoot a ton of sports and have no problem making very tight deadlines with Aperture.
Well, by "no problem" I mean no more of a problem than any other poor bastard out there making deadlines. |
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David Minton, Photographer, Student/Intern
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Denton | TX | USA | Posted: 6:29 AM on 09.09.10 |
->> I will say that the ability to toggle back and forth between a set of selected images and the rest of your shots using the colors in PM really helps me out. As I go through captioning my selected images in PM if there is a player whose number isn't visible, having the whole take reappear while still having that selected image in the middle of the contact sheet is really nice. Makes it so fast to flip backwards or forwards a few images to find a guy's jersey number then go right back to the selects to finish captioning.
Does Lightroom have anything like that? I've never played with it. |
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Jack Kurtz, Photographer
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Phoenix | AZ | United States | Posted: 9:04 AM on 09.09.10 |
->> David,
Lightroom does allow you to select subsets of photos based on star ratings or color labels. It also has a "Quick Collection" that lets you create an instant collection of photos.
jack |
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Jim Colburn, Photo Editor, Photographer
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McAllen | TX | USA | Posted: 11:13 AM on 09.09.10 |
->> "one of our photographers is pushing hard to have everyone switch over to Lightroom from Photomechanic"
If everyone else is happy with Photo Mechanic and it does what you need it to do, why switch because of one person? |
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Nick Adams, Photographer
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Norfolk | NE | | Posted: 11:46 AM on 09.09.10 |
| ->> Lightroom is a single user application. Meaning you can't share a database. |
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Thomas Boyd, Photographer
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Portland | OR | USA | Posted: 1:08 PM on 09.09.10 |
->> David M.:
Aperture has a really cool feature called "Show in Project" I use for this very thing.
Let say I've given a player three stars and I can't see his jersey number. I can right click "Show in Project" and it will take me back to that photo inside the project. I can then just look at adjacent frames and figure out who it is. |
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Robert Scheer, Photographer
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Indianapolis | IN | USA | Posted: 3:13 PM on 09.09.10 |
->> Jim C, not everybody on our staff is 100% happy with PM. Having something that applies toning as a batch is something I'm personally looking for. Other photographers have different gripes, especially shooters who shoot in jpeg and have to open everything in Photoshop.
We don't really have the money to change systems at this point. Just good to gather additional info for when/if things turn around. |
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Jim Colburn, Photo Editor, Photographer
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McAllen | TX | USA | Posted: 3:28 PM on 09.09.10 |
| ->> Are you shooting Canon? The Digital Photo Professional software that comes free with the cameras allows you to batch tone. That combined with Photo Mechanic might be a cheap and easy way to do what you want. |
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Jack Kurtz, Photographer
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Phoenix | AZ | United States | Posted: 3:35 PM on 09.09.10 |
->> Robert,
As the risk of sounding like a heretic, have you looked at Bridge? Since it comes with Photoshop it's free (sort of) and in CS4 or CS5 (I don't know what version of Photoshop you're on) it's pretty fast. Still not PM fast but a lot better than it was.
It offers robust captioning and batch processing using Adobe Camera Raw, which is the same processor that LR uses.
I think it's still too slow for deadline sports but for everything else it works pretty well. Before LR came along I used Bridge and ACR a lot only sending photos to Photoshop for noise removel and localized corrections. In CS4/CS5, ACR and Bridge also have localized corrections.
jack |
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Robert Scheer, Photographer
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Indianapolis | IN | USA | Posted: 3:40 PM on 09.09.10 |
| ->> Jim, Jack, yes, shooting Canon, and have CS4. Definitely sounding like a dolt here, but I did not realize that this could be done with my RAW files using the software I already have. Ugh, and thank you! |
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Robert Scheer, Photographer
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Indianapolis | IN | USA | Posted: 4:24 PM on 09.09.10 |
->> Ah, "Synchronize!" in the Canon Raw Photoshop plug-in.
These aren't the droids you're looking for. . . |
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Frank Niemeir, Photographer
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Woodstock | GA | usa | Posted: 4:28 PM on 09.09.10 |
->> Lightroom 3 noise reduction. I could have used this when I was shooting high school sports:
http://bit.ly/bb83Cq |
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Jim Colburn, Photo Editor, Photographer
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McAllen | TX | USA | Posted: 5:47 PM on 09.09.10 |
| ->> DPP will also batch process JPEGs. |
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