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Posts Tagged ‘Adobe’

Photography, Technology | 0 comment

Software Upheaval Post 1 – Tech Thursday

Lightroom 4 - Library Module

The last few weeks, the photography community has been active with discussion over the software suite, the Adobe Creative Cloud. If you do not know, Adobe is the latest company to switch to a subscription model. Going forward, if you want to have the latest version of Photoshop, you need to pay a monthly fee of $20 to activate the software for use. Microsoft has also done this with their new version of the productivity suite named Office 365, but they also have a version (Office 2013) that you can purchase as before.

Adobe Subscription Model

Some of the good points for the users that I see is that the cost for entry in getting to Adobe Photoshop is lowered. Instead of purchasing the program for $600 or more up front, it is now only $20 to start, and your investment will be the equivalent of 30 months of use for the software. I last purchased the Adobe CS5 suite in 2010, so this is the same amount I would have spent if I bought a new version in 2013. In addition, if you use ANY of the other Adobe products in their catalog, it is only $50 a month to have access to the ENTIRE catalog!

For me, I use InDesign to create posters, large prints, and other pieces where layouts are important. Working with photos through all their products is seamless if you need to use them for prints, videos, or the web. You edit photos in Lightroom, retouch them in Photoshop, then export them to use in InDesign, Premiere, or whatever software you need to make the final product. The $50 over 30 months would come to $1500 which is less than the $2000+ price tag up front for the package when I last checked!

Creative Cloud Software

The name is a bit misleading to me. Just because it is called the Creative Cloud does not mean that you have to be connected to the internet to edit your files. This would take too long, and would eat up your bandwidth. The software will only check periodically to ensure proper activation by the user. This also allows Adobe to push out new features and updates to users faster. If there is something that is added to the program, you no longer have to wait months for a new release or large patch to start using the new features. Also you no longer have to specify whether you are using Windows or Mac OSX when purchasing the suite. This used to be a separate expense if you had both systems in your studio.

This sounds like I am “all-in” for the new subscription model from Adobe. There are some cons to going with this. There is more outcry online on this side of the argument, and it actually keeps me from jumping in yet. In the next Tech Thursday post, I’ll review these cons, and let you know my final conclusion after examining both sides. Everything is changing so quickly these days, I’m just trying to keep up, and to make sure it makes sense for what I am doing. Let me know what you think about it!

Lightroom 4 - Library Module
Lightroom 4 – Library Module
Adobe InDesign CS5
Adobe InDesign CS5

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Personal, Photography, Technology | 0 comment

Adobe Lightroom Library – Tech Thursday

Adobe Lightroom Version 4

In photography school, my first digital class introduced me to Lightroom when it was still a free downloadable beta program. Much like Quickbooks for accountants, this program is the most essential piece of software for photographers today. In each version, they have added so many features, that it is rare when initially editing an event where I have to go into the full version of Photoshop. I think of Lightroom as the version of Photoshop with all of the non-photographer functions stripped out. Then fitted with a modern interface that is analagous to working on touchscreen or tablets more than keyboard and mouse.

Library Module

In the screen capture below, you can see the Library module – the default for working in Lightroom.

Adobe Lightroom 4 Library

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In this module, you can get a quick overview of the photos in your collection. Each cell shows the file name, and some of the important data in the corners. There are also many icons around the image which help to identify your progress. You can sort by photos that you want to keep, delete photos that are not usable, and organize the thousands of photos into sections that you can break down prior to working.

On the left side of the screen is a Navigator which has an enlargement of the selected photo, then a file explorer-type interface for working with the files on your computer. This allows management of images whether they are stored locally, or on network drives. Collections also helps to keep track of photos that you may want use later, or favorites of especially good photos that you want to go back to in the future.

On the right side of the screen, there is a histogram of the selected image. This is a graphical representation of the tones in the images from darkest on the left, to lightest on the right. This helps to see how good an exposure is for each photograph – a curve skewing to the left will tend to be underexposed (too dark) while a curve skewing to the right will tend to be overexposed (too bright). In the Develop module, I will talk about this more, but it is in the Library module too if you want to use any of the Quick Develop functions just underneath the histogram.

Keywords

Keywording, underneath the Quick Develop, is another way that Lightroom makes managing photos great for working photographers and saves them lots of time in the process. If you have a catalog of thousands of photos of various events from weddings, ballroom dance, personal photos, etc., keywording lets you tag photos with descriptive words to help you identify photos in case you need to find them quickly in the future. This can be powerful for photojournalists or sports photographers to find previous subjects when requested by newspapers, customers, etc.

The last buttons on the right perform “Sync” functions from selected photos. “Sync Settings” will let you apply changes that you make to one photo (Exposure, color balance, saturation, etc.) and apply those same changes to a group of selected photos. This is an AMAZING time saver and helps me to work on more important aspects of an image, rather than having to make adjustments to many photos one at a time.

When I first started using Lightroom, I could not foresee that my photography career would lead to shooting ballroom dance events with 10,000+ photos each. This program alone has allowed me to make many photos for dancers and edit them as quickly as I can for them to see within 2 weeks of events. It is still a lot of work, but from the feedback I get from customers, I think the results are worth it.

TimeLine Media – www.timelinedc.com
703-864-8208

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