Adobe Lightroom Workspace Overview

Posted by Jennifer | June 22, 2007

If you have used a program such as Adobe Photoshop before, you’ll notice that Lightroom looks a little bit different. The workspace is an elegant dark grey and black, allowing your image to be the most important part of the proceedings.


Lightroom Menu Bar


The main menu commands sit at the top of the screen. If you choose to view the application in full screen mode, the menu bar will disappear but you can view it again by rolling the mouse up to the top of the screen.

Modules


This section lets you switch between the five different modules.

Image Display Area


The Image Display area is the main section of the workspace where you work with the images you’ve imported into Lightroom. When using the Library module, you can view a selection of thumbnail images in a gridlike structure – known as Grid mode. You can also view images in Loupe mode in the Library and Develop modules. Loupe mode means the images can be displayed at a 1:1 scale size or a “view to fit” size.


In the other modules – Slideshow, Web and Print - you can see previews of how images or screen pages will look when they are output from Lightroom.

Toolbar


The toolbar contains several tool options and appears in all Lightroom modules.

Filmstrip


The Filmstrip sits at the bottom of the screen and displays thumbnails of every image currently in the Library. Any images that are currently selected will be highlighted. The Filmstrip is visible in every module allowing you to pick out any images you want without having to go back to the Library module.

Right Side Panel


The panel on the right hand side of the screen shows controls for adjusting images. The “Quick Develop” palette lets you apply settings across multiple images. This panel will change change depending on which module you are working in.

You can expand or collapse the Panel options by clicking on the panel bar. Holding down Alt and clicking on a panel bar toggles between expanding to show the contents of that panel only or expanding to show all panels.

You can open and close individual panels in the order they are listed from the top down by holding down the Ctrl (windows) or Cmd (mac) key in combination with a keypad number (1, 2, 3, and so on).

Left Side panel


The panel on the left side of the screen contains palettes for managing your images and presets. The image on the right shows the palettes available in the Library module. In the Develop, Slideshow, and Print modules, it is used for storing and quickly accessing saved settings.

So that’s the interface of Lightroom. There’s certainly plenty of panels to play with and buttons to press but it has been designed in such a way that it doesn’t feel cramped or cluttered

You can download a 30 day trial of lightroom here

Posted by Jennifer | Filed Under Lightroom 

Photoshop Vs Lightroom

Posted by Jennifer | June 19, 2007

For a long time now Photoshop has been THE image editing program for rasterised or pixel based images. With each new version of the program we have seen superb advances and wonderful tools which improve the workflow of the many different types of Photoshop user – from graphic and web designers to special effects technicians and illustrators.

Personally, I love Photoshop and I use it every single day either for my design work or for editing my photographs. However, the program has become more and more complex as it becomes all things to all people. What began life as an image editing program for single images has now become a huge beast of a thing. It is now in version 10 (Photoshop CS 3). If you’ve been using Photoshop for the last few years, many of it’s tools will have become second nature. However, if you are just joining in the fun now, there really is a very steep learning curve.

Now we have Adobe Lightroom and things have become a little bit simpler. Lightroom is aimed directly at Photographers and although, I’ve only been using it for a couple of months, I can say that Lightroom could be considered an ideal solution for users who want to do a little bit of editing on their images, without have to learn the many tools in the Photoshop toolbox. The powerful image processor and image database in Lightroom is designed to emulate the typical workflow of a photographer.


Lightroom is a brand new program, we’re on version 1 now, and it was designed with very specific needs in mind and tested by the general public for several months as a free downloadable beta version.

One of the major differences between the programs is how they deal with image adjustments. In Photoshop, when you apply more than one adjustment, the image is increasingly degraded with each consecutive change. In Lightroom, you can make as many changes to the image as you want, but it is only when you save your image as a PSD, JPEG or TIFF that a final, single adjustment is applied.

Another big difference is how the interface looks. The new program has a stylish, dark grey workspace broken down into 5 modules. It’s easy to move around the program and there are far fewer tools and sections to get your head around.

The program is incredibly efficient and allows the photographer to take in large folders of images, make adjustments and quickly produce contact sheets, a web gallery or setup printing options.

Realistically, I don’t believe it will come down to an “either, or” situation. Lightroom is certainly a standalone program but it is also tightly integrated with Photoshop. For many photographers, Lightroom should offer all of the image management and processing capability that they’ll need. For other’s, Photoshop with it’s highly developed capabilities is the only choice. That’s the important thing, it’s all about choice.

Posted by Jennifer | Filed Under Lightroom