By Monte Ferguson Our May meeting started out with talk about the upcoming iPhones and iPhone OS 3.0. One of our members had a developers build and he was giving demonstrations of the new features in the release. We also discussed the rumors and screenshots showing up on the web regarding Snow Leopard.
Our main presentation topic was a rescheduled LightRoom 2 demonstration. Our own Katie Weller took us through the programs paces.
Katie said that she’s gotten so used to Lightroom that it has become second nature for her to use the program. She has a hard time using a competing program like Aperture. She says that it functions in a structured manner and that is her preferred way of handling her photos.
LightRoom breaks down the digitial photo processing workflow into tasks. Certain tools are only available in specific modes of the program. Aperture, on the other hand, has all of the tools available at all times. It’s more of a free flow approach. But some find it confusing.
One of the programs strengths is the ease with which it works with Photoshop or Photoshop Elements. With both of these programs you can seamlessly round trip, or send a photo out to apply an edit then work with it again in LightRoom. Other editors can be used but the experience is not as seamless.
The program incorporates some powerful editing tools. Such as the healing brush, red eye removal and masking. You can also customize the heck out of the program. You can make and share presets for manipulating photos. There are also many plug ins available for the program. The most popular plug ins let you import or export photos with the likes of Flickr and FaceBook.
Here are some other positive aspects of the program. Changes to an image are quick and do not require a pre-render. The changes are only applied at export. So you can always go back and experiment. You can choose to copy photos into the LightRoom catalog or leave them where they are. LightRoom is awesome at saving MetaData. It also exports that data, including tags and EXIF info, when uploading files to places like Flickr. The program is also quite lenient on minimum system requirements. You can still use it on a later model G4 Mac.
There are some irritating limitations to the program. The slideshow feature is the weakest part of the whole thing. It only saves out to static pdfs. Yet the web area lets you save out to Flash or HTML. It can not work directly with pictures stored in iPhoto. But you can point it to the iPhoto photo file directly and it can open the image.
Katie did a great job outlining the programs strengths and weakness’. She noted that you can download a time limited demo and try it out for yourself.
We concluded the meeting with a giveaway. Our grand prize was a Wacom Bamboo tablet. John Burch was our lucky winner for the night.
Posted: Wednesday, July 15th, 2009 | 
