lightroom or CS3?

[rtropp]

I am using the lightroom trial and was considering purchasing it. Then I started reading about CS3 and its "bridge" and its "adobe camera raw" plug in.

The question:
If I am going to buy CS3 anyway, should I bother with Lightroom? It seems that the new cs3 has many of the same organization and develop features. Since the 199 price runs out on april 30th, I need to make that decision quickly.

Any thoughts?
Thanks
Richard

[yurik]

If you have no other photo organization tools, then I would suggest getting lightroom.

Photoshop in general is more of an imaging program, that doesn't have very intuitive tagging, rating, or organizing features (I'm using CS2, but I don't think they changed anything like that on CS3).

Lightroom, on the other hand, has a pretty unique and useful "developing" (as they call it) software incorporated in it.


The way I see it, it's pretty useful to have both, if you're willing to empty out your piggy bank. But getting one or the other is probably just as good, as there are cheap/free alternatives to photo editing programs and photo organizing programs.

[AZ4Runner]

It all depends on what you plan on doing. Lightroom was developed specifically for the photographer, where as CS3 was developed for a much wider graphics designer audience.

If you're looking for the digital workflow that will most likely be used for photography I'd suggest Lightroom. Lightroom is great for ingesting photos, keyword tagging, and processing your images. There are a few things that aren't all that great (sharpening comes to mind), that you may end up having to do in another program (Photoshop, Elements or half a dozen other products out there).

Adobe has made a ton of upgrades to Photoshop with the digital Photographer in mind. Check out Scott Kelby's review of the new features in Photoshop CS3 (http://www.photoshopuser.com/cs3/index.html). Everything I've read (from Scott Kelby and others) makes CS3 seem like a no brainer upgrade for those of us using CS2 and are looking for a bit more out of Bridge.

Photoshop in general is more of an imaging program, that doesn't have very intuitive tagging, rating, or organizing features (I'm using CS2, but I don't think they changed anything like that on CS3).

Bridge is actually quite robust and you can do all of this in bridge. Its not as intuitive as Lightroom is, but supposedly Bridge has reaped the benefits of Lightroom's development.

[smc1377]

Ditto on what AZRunner has said.

Another bonus for CS3 (and CS2 for that matter) with Adobe Bridge is that Bridge is able to perform functions that Photoshop is able to do, but without using photoshop.

Meaning, when I take multiple raw photos and need to convert them all to jpg (so that my wife can see them on her networked computer), I use Bridge to do all the processing and conversion. Meaning, I can select all 200 pictures (or however many you took) in Bridge and open up Adobe Camera Raw and adjust white balance, brightness, contrast, etc. and then apply it to all images and batch save them.

This is all done using Bridge and Adobe Camera Raw. And because Bridge was the program that opened up ACR, I can then go into Photoshop and still have full functionality of the program available.

There are other things that Bridge can do that I used to use photoshop to do, but this way, I'm freeing up photoshop so that I can do other things will Bridge is doing the tasks that used to require photoshop to do.

I have no idea if that makes sense, but the Adobe Training Videos will tell you more about this when you buy the program.

[Murtasma]

I don't know what people would spend all that money on lightroom. Photoshop CS3 can do everything lightroom can do plus more. You just have to be smart about how you store your images. Keep them well orginized on your file system and delete the bad ones. Use a few raw viewing program like the utlity that comes with canon cameras you can even download it for free. It has a rating system and I think you can even add tags.

I have one partition on my computer just dedicated to my source pictures. The partition is 20 GB in size which may last for a month of shooting. Once the partition is full I burn them to DVD's and label the DVD's (this is key I don't really label them I'm to lazy) then tuck them away in case I need the orginal source later in the future. Just give your PSD and JPG files once you have convereted them to raw a nice long good file name. You should not need any formal software application to keep track of your files it just over complicates things.

It does for me anyways as a System Administrator I am very comfortable going around my file system and remembering where stuff is located. Just plan out how you want to store files and keep using that method.

There's no reason that I can see to use a peice of software like Lightroom unless your to lazy to take the 30 minutes and do it the proper way first ;)

[Flippant]

I have been using photoshop for a long, long time (since 2.0) and i must say it has come a long way to be more 'photographer friendly'. I have yet to upgrade from CS2, but recently i have been trying out Lightroom.
The workflow is completely different.
In PS, i am accustomed to saving multiple versions, making lots of adjustment/duplicate layers etc.
in Lightroom the process is greatly streamlined: you can adjust a picture all you want, and never have to deal with a .psd file. the changes are stored as filters in a database, and lightroom doesn't touch the original file. only when you export are the changes 'rendered' on to a new file.

is lightroom better? it is certainly less versatile. it won't let you do any kind of mask work, channel editing is a bit limited, no decent noise filters, etc.

BUT if you have a decent camera with good noise level, you do your work in the camera, and not too much post-processing. so I think with Lightroom, Adobe is targeting the 90% of users who just want a direct and easy way to manage lots of photos and RAWs, and really speed up their workflow.

that being said, if you an advanced enough user that you are sure you need CS3, you probably don't need lightroom.

[jmadigan]

I've played with both, and Lightroom is an impressive product. If you need to organize and shuffle through lots and lots of photos it's very powerful and easy to use. It was also head and shoulders above CS2 for RAW manipulation and it's easy to flip back and forth between browsing photos and doing fixes on them.

That said, I think I'm going to stick with CS3 and Bridge. Bridge is easier to browse with because you don't need to import the photos into it and I like having everything in what feels like one interface and one tightly integrated program. For the type of photography that I do (i.e., amateur and mostly of my kids with some fun stuff thrown in) I get by fine without Lightroom's super duper tagging and organizing tools. The only thing I don't like about the CS3/Bridge combo is that it takes a second or two to open a pic from Bridge to Camera RAW. But overall I like it better.

[hitkaiser]

Lightroom was never meant to be a replacement for Photoshop (this from Adobe)..

Lightroom provides a workflow from start to finish, however, photoshop as a tool is a lot more complete than lightroom and Bridge has improved greatly in CS3.

Since you don't have either, I recommend going with Photoshop first, get the Lightroom trial and if you feel you need it as well get it down the line.

[Dan Rowe]

Lightroom was never meant to be a replacement for Photoshop (this from Adobe)..

Lightroom provides a workflow from start to finish, however, photoshop as a tool is a lot more complete than lightroom and Bridge has improved greatly in CS3.

Since you don't have either, I recommend going with Photoshop first, get the Lightroom trial and if you feel you need it as well get it down the line.

Good advice.

[trelaflip]

I love my lightroom. I been using lightroom to organize do the basic work flow then anything that needs more tweaking I import into CS3.