Digital Media | Spotlight: Photography | Inside Lightroom | Blogs
Why I gave up Photoshop
When bought my first digital SLR in April 2006, moving from scanned film, I gave up Photoshop completely. Quit cold turkey.
At that time Lightroom was at public beta #2, and it certainly wasn't capable of doing everything Photoshop could (and still isn't). But even then there was considerable overlap in their capabilities, and rather than allowing myself to fall back on what I knew I forced myself to learn the new ways of thinking. And now that I've done so, I find I very rarely yearn for Photoshop. Truth be told, I haven't even have it installed on my main editing machine for over a year now. I now see Lightroom's approach to be far more natural, and offer more control.
Take cropping as a brief example. In the film days, we went to the printer and gave them a set of instructions: Crop as shown in grease pencil on the contact sheet, and print an 11x14. Two separate steps.
In Lightroom, we do the same thing, and there's a separate set of controls for rescaling for final output in the Export dialog, and in the Print and Web modules. These controls don't actually alter the image; they build a set of instructions to be used to modify the image later.
Once we've internalized the fundamental nature of Lightroom -- building a set of instructions -- lots of frequently asked questions go away. For example, there's no "save" button because we're not actually changing anything, and the instructions are recorded as we go. Those instructions must be applied via Export, Print, Slideshow, or Web in order to produce final output. And this approach leads to different solutions for backup and archiving of original, intermediate, and final versions.
Many ask why the keyboard shortcuts couldn't be the same, or the crop tool couldn't move the same direction, or there's no Levels control, or are otherwise frustrated by having to retrain fingers and brains. If you're one of them, I advise you to consider giving up Photoshop and immerse yourself in Lightroom until it makes sense. You might find Lightroom's ways more sensible or more effective.
0 TrackBacks
Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: Why I gave up Photoshop.
TrackBack URL for this entry: http://blogs.oreilly.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-t.cgi/8244
The main reason that I migrate from LR to PS is that I use many of the Nik and onOne plug-ins. And I still find that cloning works better in PS.
Yay! The less I have to fire up PS, the happier I am. My mantra is Get It Right In The Camera, Let Lightroom Do The Rest.
Might not work for everyone, but the less I mess with all the buttons the happier I am.
I'm still a photoshop fanatic
I can't say that I am a convert as I never really got into PS. I had PSE for a while and still do. I do everything that I need to do in LR and I very, very seldom feel that I am missing something and need to fire up PSE.
The non-destructive editing that emodies the LR philosophy just seems so natural and so right. Well done Adobe!
While Lightroom is my workhorse, I'm going down a route of learning to create digital art from photographs. I've been doing the grunge/texture thing for ages, but that's very basic and I'm seeking knowledge on stepping further in that direction. It's certainly more illustration than photography I'm seeking (e.g. see http://www.rebecca-parker.co.uk for example) in these cases. However for my mainstream photography work, I only really go to Photoshop for the retouching work not possible in Lightroom.
I find that Lightroom covers my needs for 95% of my work. I mainly use Photoshop for particularly heavy spotting work when processing for stock (rare as I try to keep the sensor pretty clean), or to run noise filtering plugins (which could probably be done stand alone anyway).
The non-destructive editing abilities of Lightroom are the big draw for me. Third parties pulgins like Nik Sharpener Pro are my only valid reason for jumping to Photoshop these days.
Since Apple's Aperture supports photoshop plugins, that would be a complete workflow - but I feel the community adoption of Aperture isn't as robust as Lightroom.
Funny Adobe's Lightroom still doesn't support photoshop plugins!?
Martk, I agree. In my case, LR rules out PS because of its speed. With Lightroom I can quick-develop 20 pictures in one hour. However, Photoshop matters, if I want to tweak a single picture in one hour.
I am happy to find many useful information in the post, writing sequence is awesome, I always look for quality content, thanks for sharing.
Versace Eyeglasses
Yay! The less I have to fire up PS, the happier I am. My mantra is Get It Right In The Camera, Let Lightroom Do The Rest.