Dave Benham

Adobe have released a public beta of Lightroom 3, the program that takes all the best photographic bits out of Photoshop.

I’ve said before that if you’re a photographer you owe it to yourself to give it a go. I know there are people that find Photoshop a bit scary, and Lightroom is much easier to manage, especially on a workflow basis. Personally I use Lightroom for 90% of my photographic work.

So what’s different? This is Tom Hogarty’s take, part of the Lightroom team:

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Have you seen the car insurance advert with Iggy Pop – “I’m not selling car insurance, I’m selling time.” Well Mr Pop, I’d like to buy some time please. Preferably to be inserted just before my alarm is meant to go off in the morning.

Sadly Iggy can’t really help me. But there are a number of ways of improving my workflow that really will save time. I’ve mentioned before that I use Lightroom to process my images, which already saves me loads of time. About 95% of my adjustments (white balance, the odd crop here and there) are done from Lightroom. Photoshop is there if needed, but I only tend to fire this up for serious image resizing or complex edits. Photoshop is for the designer; Lightroom is for the photographer.

I’ve installed a new plugin this week which lets you export your files directly from Lightroom to Flickr. It’s a brilliant piece of work by Jeffrey Friedl. Working as part of the export process, it uses the Flickr API to automatically upload your pictures using the keywords as tags. Metadata can be expanded or restricted as well. Download the Lightroom Flickr plugin from Jeffrey’s blog and see what I mean! It will even tweet out when you’ve added the pictures if you want.

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