Opinions on Lightroom

[Manfred M]

Manfred,

If you have any questions about the Book module, especially as it pertains to sending a book to Blurb, don't hesitate to reach out to me. I've now produced two complete books using LR5 and Blurb, so I have a reasonable idea of what to expect, how to prevent issues, etc.

Thanks Mike - I've started designing a Blurb book using InDesign (way more powerful than Lightroom), but also slower. I'll have to see how I make out

[Glenn NK]

Manfred:

First post: http://www.luminous-landscape.com/fo...?topic=80824.0

[Manfred M]

Manfred:

First post: http://www.luminous-landscape.com/fo...?topic=80824.0

Not surprisingly, others have the same issue(s) with LR that I do. Fortunately, there is a solution; Photoshop versus the develop module, InDesign rather than Book module, etc...

That being said, there is a bit of a cost difference.

[Glenn NK]

I think we will see dual monitor capability in LR6.

Book module first appeared in LR5 - it's a work in progress I think.

I could be biased, but it seems that the progression curve in LR is steeper than that in PS. PS is a mature platform; LR is comparatively young and has farther to go. But I'm confident it will go.

[Mike Buckley]

Book module first appeared in LR5

It's in LR4 but I don't know when it first appeared.

EDIT: The LR5 manual explains using the Book module in both LR3 and LR4.

[Adrian]

Mike

Re Blurb, have you discovered a means of saving work in progress when compelling a book? We have also done a couple of books in Blurb/LR5 and in one case suffered a complete loss of partially finished work when it crashed and was irrecoverable. In our case my wife was working on page layouts and adding text and about a days work was lost. This risk was almost enough to put us off and if it happens again we will stop using the Blurb module.

I know you can save the templates, but not as far as I can see, the actual work done - in particular the ordering and arrangement of images.

Adrian

[Mike Buckley]

I'm very confused, Adrian. I thought everything in LR is automatically saved to the database as each change is made.

Your experience makes me wonder if nothing is saved if you have not created a "saved book." In the top right area of the Book module, notice the button, "Create Saved Book." Once you use that function, every change is automatically saved as you make the change as far as I know. For whatever reason I never gave any thought to, when working on each of the two books I produced I used that function at the very beginning of creating the book.

I don't remember LR5 ever crashing, but every time I open the program the Book module is in the state as when I closed the program. Moreover, closing the program doesn't provide the opportunity to save anything, which confirms my thinking that all the changes are being automatically saved as they are being made. Closing the program only provides the opportunity to back up the database.

Hope this helps. If not, I'm completely stumped.

[Adrian]

If only this were true Mike! When you pursue the web, with numerous threads about Lightroom crashes, you will see that the Create Saved Book does not actually save all the work you have done to date developing that book.

Lightroom is capable of crashing during production of a book. In our case (and that of other users) this appeared to be caused by further editing of an image whilst being used in the book.

In normal use the book data is retained by Lightroom and will re-open where you left off: right up to the point at which you experience a crash. Then you lose everything. The fundamental issue is that the Blurb book tab or plug in for LR5 (and this also afflicted LR4 apparently) has no back-up facility. So when it crashes, there is no means of recovery.

The Blurb module is unstable and somewhat risky for this reason. We are ultra wary now! My wife goes to the lengths of taking screen shots of her layouts as she goes along!

Kind regards

Adrian

(The book products when they arrive are pretty good. In our experience they print a trifle dark and Blurb needs better options for print profiles).

[Mike Buckley]

Thanks for that heads up, Adrian. I had no idea. I guess the workaround is to exit the program regularly and often while using the Book module.

In our case (and that of other users) this [crashes] appeared to be caused by further editing of an image whilst being used in the book.

That might explain why LR5 has never crashed on me. (I never used the Book module in LR4.) 99% of my image editing is done using Capture NX2, so I have never edited an image while it is in the Book module.

[Simon Garrett]

An awful lot of misconceptions about Lightroom floating around here.

One may or may not like Lightroom - that's a matter of preference. But it is very reliable, and problems of apparent data loss people encounter are - I'm quite sure - generally caused by user error.

There are two major concepts of Lightroom that distinguish it from most other image editing systems, and these are often poorly understood (as demonstrated by a number of posts on this thread):

1. Lightroom maintains a database (the catalogue) of images that it will process. The catalogue shadows how you choose to store your files. It does not impose any structure on you. All edit information can be stored with the image files (not just in the catalogue) although the order of edits is stored only in the catalogue. Even if the catalogue is completely lost, you have not lost your files or your edits.
2. All editing by Lightroom itself is non-destructive (parametric).

I've followed several Lightroom forums, and so far as I can judge, all the reports of catalogue or file corruption I've read result from user error or hardware failure. Yes, there are reports of Lightroom "losing files" or "corrupting files" or whatever, but most I've read come from people that clearly don't really understand how Lightroom works, and when asked detailed questions can't really say what they did, or give confused answers.

Talking about Lightroom's "fatal flaws" - well, my background is also IT and I don't agree. It's a misconception of Lightroom to talk of "all eggs in the same basket" or similar. You can back up catalogues as often as you want - just like files - and the further benefit is that Lightroom checks the integrity of the catalogue whenever it backs it up (or at any other occasion you specify). And in any case: if you keep edit data stored in xmp format, you have an instant backup of edit information - so edits are stored in two places. Already better than having just one copy of an edited file!

One can like or dislike Lightroom - but to talk about fatal flaws or design weaknesses flies in the face of the experience of the very large number of people that use it without problem.

[Colin Southern]

An awful lot of misconceptions about Lightroom floating around here.

One may or may not like Lightroom - that's a matter of preference. But it is very reliable, and problems of apparent data loss people encounter are - I'm quite sure - generally caused by user error.

There are two major concepts of Lightroom that distinguish it from most other image editing systems, and these are often poorly understood (as demonstrated by a number of posts on this thread):

1. Lightroom maintains a database (the catalogue) of images that it will process. The catalogue shadows how you choose to store your files. It does not impose any structure on you. All edit information can be stored with the image files (not just in the catalogue) although the order of edits is stored only in the catalogue. Even if the catalogue is completely lost, you have not lost your files or your edits.
2. All editing by Lightroom itself is non-destructive (parametric).

I've followed several Lightroom forums, and so far as I can judge, all the reports of catalogue or file corruption I've read result from user error or hardware failure. Yes, there are reports of Lightroom "losing files" or "corrupting files" or whatever, but most I've read come from people that clearly don't really understand how Lightroom works, and when asked detailed questions can't really say what they did, or give confused answers.

Talking about Lightroom's "fatal flaws" - well, but my background is also IT and I simply don't agree. It's a misconception of Lightroom to talk of "all eggs in the same basket" or similar. You can back up catalogues as often as you want - just like files - and the further benefit is that Lightroom checks the integrity of the catalogue whenever it backs it up (or at any other occasion you specify). And in any case: if you keep edit data stored in xmp format, you have an instant backup of edit information - so edits are stored in two places. Already better than having just one copy of an edited file!

One can like or dislike Lightroom - but to talk about fatal flaws or design weaknesses flies in the face of the experience of the very large number of people that use it without problem.

Just a couple of comments:

1. Lightroom CAN be configured to save edit data into a DNG or XMP Sidecar file (which I think is a great idea) instead of the database, but that's not the default behaviour.

2. The issue I have when edits are stored only in the catalog/database is that although you can back it up as often as you like, if the database contains edits covering historical work (likely) - and corruption occurs in areas relating to historical work - then it's entirely possible (likely) that the corrupt database will be backed up over older backups without the photographer being aware that there's a problem - losing edits forever if LR was still in it's default configuration of storing edits only in the database.

If the edits are stored in the original image file (a-la DNG) - and that file is backed up - then "problem solved", but that's not the way many do it (even backing up a sidecar / image file pair cures overcomes the dependency on a single database).

But the default configuration combined with the average users poor knowledge and compliance with effective backup strategies leaves them vulnerable.

[Simon Garrett]

Thanks for the correction, Colin.

Agreed, you have to select the option to save edits with the file. I can't remember if the default for that option is "on" or "off".

None of what I said alters whether Lightroom is "good" or "bad", only that I think some of the comments about its reliability are misplaced.

[davidedric]

I currently have Lightroom configured in the default setting. If I change it to add a. xmp sidecars file, is there a way of retrospectively adding the sidecar files for historical edits? If the edits are stored in both the catalogue and the sidecar, which does Lightroom "choose" to apply the edits? Finally, is there a significant performance hit in choosing catalogue, sidecar or both. Sorry for all the questions, guidance would be much appreciated.

Dave

[Colin Southern]

Thanks for the correction, Colin.

Agreed, you have to select the option to save edits with the file. I can't remember if the default for that option is "on" or "off".

None of what I said alters whether Lightroom is "good" or "bad", only that I think some of the comments about its reliability are misplaced.

For what it's worth, I can't recall having an issue with the stability of any Adobe software, which is quite something considering the complexity of it.

Personally, I can't stand it -- but I know that a lot of 'togs like it. My biggest "grind" with it is people leaving all edits in the database and never backing it up ...

[Colin Southern]

I currently have Lightroom configured in the default setting. If I change it to add a. xmp sidecars file, is there a way of retrospectively adding the sidecar files for historical edits? If the edits are stored in both the catalogue and the sidecar, which does Lightroom "choose" to apply the edits? Finally, is there a significant performance hit in choosing catalogue, sidecar or both. Sorry for all the questions, guidance would be much appreciated.

Dave

I'm not the one to ask, but off memory, I think one can just select the files and then do something like a ctrl+S to write them (don't quote me, and I'm sure someone will chip in with a more authoritive answer -- but short answer, yes, I believe it's easy to do).

I'm not sure if one has priority over the other. As I understand it, the functionality was added to allow interoperability with bridge/ACR (which reads info from DNG and XMP files, but has no knowledge of the LR database) .

With a modern PC with sufficient RAM I wouldn't expect any performance hit writing to both. If I had a choice I'd never store edits in the database though -- to me it makes no sense to have image data in one location and edit data in another. Keep the two together and you can't go wrong

[Simon Garrett]

I currently have Lightroom configured in the default setting. If I change it to add a. xmp sidecars file, is there a way of retrospectively adding the sidecar files for historical edits? If the edits are stored in both the catalogue and the sidecar, which does Lightroom "choose" to apply the edits? Finally, is there a significant performance hit in choosing catalogue, sidecar or both. Sorry for all the questions, guidance would be much appreciated.

Dave

If you turn on that option ("Edit" menu, "Catalog settings", "Metadata" tab, and check "Automatically write changes into XMP") then I don't think it retrospectivly writes past edits into xmp. What you can do is to select a file, or files, or the entire catalog (top of the tree), right-click (not sure in Mac) and choose "Save metadata". Before doing any catalog-wide operation like that, I'd take a backup of the catalog. Go to Edit, Catalog settings, General tab, and set the "Backup" drop-down list to "when Lightroom next exits", and exit immediately.

When you save edits to the xmp file, I'm sure Lightroom uses the catalog version. You can't choose to store the edits in the xmp file only. However, it should warn you (an icon on the image border in grid view) if the metadata in the file appears to be later than the version in the catalog. You can right-click any file (not sure for Mac) and choose Metadata, read from file or write to file, which chooses which version you want in the event of a mismatch. A mismatch can occur, for example, if you edit a file in Photoshop's ACR (i.e. outside Lightroom).

I have heard people say that there is a performance hit from the write to xmp option. I've tried with it on and off, and not noticed any performance difference. My catalog is on a hard drive - not an SSD - so if there is much of an overhead I ought to notice it.

Edit: my post crossed with Colin's - and as he says (and I missed), you can also save metadata to the xmp file for any one photo (or selection of photos) by control-S.

[davidedric]

Thanks for the quick reply, Colin.

When doing a catalogue back up, Lightroom first does an integrity check - which is supposed to guard against corruption. I wonder if folks have had experience of corruption after the integrity check?

I take the point about the sense of keeping edits with the image file, but I would certainly have to change my back up approach. At the moment I have multiple copies of my raw files, and am relying on Lightroom catalog back up to manage the edits. Clearly, with embedded edits that would have to change! Cheers, Dave

[Shadowman]

I had another look, yes, they've combined the parametrica and point modes into a single interface. It's just a lot larger in ACR, so more accurate to use.

As I said before, they have a common engine across the two products, but the implementations are not quite the same. I guess I prefer the ACR approach because the layout is better suited for my workflow. I tend to finish up in PS, regardless so I do tend to find that I prefer the Bridge / ACR layout to the LR one. Things are less squished together in ACR. As well, I will use two other RAW converters - View NX2 and and DxO Optics Pro; neither of which play nice with LR...

My main use of LR is tethered shooting.

What I do use LR for is the Map module and I am playing around with the Book module as well. I find the Library module to not work for my workflow and find I have to work around it every time I use LR.

I wonder if tethered shooting capability is LR's pro versus con feature. Obviously cumbersome for some styles of photography, but if you can get the shot in camera; then the limited editing functions might be enough for most photographers.

[chauncey]

Tethered shooting...in spite of being a LR proponent, I much prefer using Canon's Utility Software for tethered shooting as it gives you total camera control from your keyboard, from altering SS/ISO/f/stop to changing focus points. It gives focus stacking a whole new level of perfection. That kind of camera control is missing when you use LR for tethered shooting.

[Mike Buckley]

It has been mentioned several times in this thread that a preference setting will write image edits to a DNG file. I have looked twice and have never found that setting. I don't need it now but may need it in the future and others may also be interested in using it now. So, it would be helpful if someone would please explain exactly how to locate that setting.