Lightroom 4 - At Home Event

[Mike Farley]

A couple of members have recently acquired Lightroom 4, so if there is sufficient interest it could be a good opportunity for me to run an "at home" event to go through the basics of this very useful application. As well as those who are new to the software, it would also be useful to those who are thinking about buying it. I prefer to limit numbers to four or possibly five at a pinch, so it will be on a first come, first served basis. If it looks as though there will be enough people to make it worthwhile running the session, we can agree a suitable date.

Reply to this thread if you would like to attend.

Also, a reminder that Cameraworld is still selling Lightroom 4 at a bargain price of £68, which is good value considering the usefulness of the product and the wide range of functions which it offers.

http://www.cameraworld.co.uk/ViewProdDe ... isitetype=

[Tina]

Hi Mike

As I said last night I would like to come to your 'at home' for Lightroom 4 and I can bring cake.

Thanks
Tina

[Mike Farley]

It is worth pointing out that the run through of Lightroom will include Adobe's Camera Raw processing, so the event would also be of interest to anyone wanting to find out a bit more about using Raw files.

[Canonballer]

Hi Mike,

As discussed, I would appreciate it if you would please count me in on this.

Thanks,

Dave

[EricK]

If there is still a space left I would be interested,

EricK

[davidc]

I'm interested depending when it may be scheduled for. However as I don't own the software and would mainly be using it as and additional means of trialling it then others who do own it and want advice should be given priority.

I'm downloading a trial tonight and testing it out, the performance issues are the biggest impediment to me buying it so seeing someone experienced in its use vs. me as a beginner would be a useful test.

[Mike Farley]

The performance issues were resolved with version 4.1 of the software.

I'll set a date in the next day or so.

[davidc]

The performance issues were resolved with version 4.1 of the software.

I'll set a date in the next day or so.

Hmm I've still seen reports with people running on v4.4 having them, including a guy I work with - he's brought his laptop into work and it's a good 10-12 secs between actions. Which is why I want to see for myself on my own image collection as well as someone else who doesn't have the issue.

[davidc]

Actually while I wait for the trial to download, maybe you might be able to answer some questions?

The "develop" module. I gather one of the big selling points for Lightroom is that you never edit an image but rather save all your changes to an accompanying file which are used to final create say a JPG if you like the look of the finished version and want to use it? If that's the case I'm not sure how that's different to having a raw file, opening it in ACR to make initial changes, exporting as a JPG and then finishing it off in Photoshop perhaps? I'm probably missing something but at the end of the day do you not have a RAW and a JPG file and not have saved any space? Probably missing a subtlety there!

The library module. I gather you setup a catalogue of your images here? Do you know how it would cope with images split across the HDD in my laptop and a major image store on a shared network hard drive array? Is it recommended I have all image files on my laptop for instance?

Also, in terms of adding and reviewing new images, if I took 100 photos and wanted to delete 80 of them, presumably even though it's non-destructive editing you can tell it to permanently delete junk files from your PC (rather than just the lightroom catalogue?) The example I'm thinking of is the daily dump of 365 project images - can I quickly filter through, rate the ones I like and permanently delete the rest, or do I have to do that outside of lightroom?

These are a few of the questions I've been mulling over most - while I see the value in the image management LR offers I'm trying to think of specific instances which might mean it's perhaps not the optimum choice for me.

Thanks 50% download to go!

[Mike Farley]

Hmm I've still seen reports with people running on v4.4 having them, including a guy I work with - he's brought his laptop into work and it's a good 10-12 secs between actions. Which is why I want to see for myself on my own image collection as well as someone else who doesn't have the issue.

Without seeing your friend's laptop, I cannot really comment, but I would suspect that the problem lies there rather than with Lightroom. Possibly they need to look at the performance related settings in Preferences, although the defaults are normally sensible. The application is widely used by professionals and they would find something else instead if performance were a general problem. The initial version of LR4 did have a perceptible lag, but nothing as bad as you mention and this was quickly resolved in 4.1. The laptop I use for public demonstrations has an Intel ULV dual core CPU, which seems to be just one step above the Atom in terms of performance. When viewing images and making adjustments in Raw, there is no responses lag.

You do not say what the actions are when your friend experiences a 10 - 12 second delay. In my experience, the most common time consuming activities are the loading of images from disk when Lightroom starts (which is dependent on the transfer speed of the disk), rendering enlargements if a preview has not already been generated, the actual Raw conversion which takes a few seconds on even the most powerful machine, synchronising Development settings and outputting to PDF. Depending on the number of images, the latter can take several minutes or more. One thing to bear in mind is that the application multi-tasks and it can carry out several functions simultaneously. So synchronising development settings, for example, does not mean that other things cannot be done at the same time while such activities run in the background.