Artist’s Tools

I recently read a blog entry of a friend of mine. He was professing his love for Ardour, an open source digital audio workstation package. We frequently talk about our non-professional pursuits, in his case music, photography in mine. We have both come to rely on a primary piece of software to facilitate our art. Ardour is his tool of choice.

Over the last year, I have been beta testing Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, which is a photo editing, digital asset management (DAM), raw workflow program. I had been using Capture One LE from Phase One, as my primary tool. It was fast enough at raw conversion, but the workflow seemed clunky to me, and it has no real DAM capability. I found over the year, that at some point I had switched all my photo work to Lightroom, and hadn’t fired up C1 in several months. Each beta added better performance and new and improved features. One of the chief advantages of C1 has been it’s ability to run at a decent speed on my G4 1.5ghz Mac Mini. Lightroom performance was not as good through beta 3. But, beta 4 introduced a much faster and feature complete product. I decided at that point that I would stick with LR and buy the 1.o version, if the price didn’t exceed the cost of the computer it is running on.

Recently Adobe announced that Lightroom had achieved 1.0 status and was available for purchase. The price, $199 now, $299 later puts it squarely in the market of Apple Aperture. So, I’ve got about 7 days before my beta, trial version of LR expires and leaves me without my primary software tool. The 1.0 version is faster than the beta 4 version. And, includes a variety of features not seen in the beta. Several of which make the decision to purchase even easier. I really like the virtual copy function, additional photo grading options (flags!) and several of the new tools in the Develop module. I’ve owned various computers over the last 25 years and there have been very few software packages that I really strongly felt help me get the job done. CA Clipper, MultiEdit, Borland Delphi, Mozilla Firefox, are all on my short list of those tools. I would definitely add Lightroom to that list. I can spend more time taking photos, and less time post processing the good photos.

It’s unfortunate that there is nothing even close to LR in the open source world. Open source image editing has pretty much centered on The Gimp. It can be argued (unsuccessfully) that The Gimp is a viable alternative to Photoshop. But there is no open source app that incorporates the functionality of LR, or Aperture. Projects like DigiKam show promise, but are still a long way from addressing the needs or professional or serious amateur photographers. It was this lack of good quality image tools that drove me from my Linux desktop to the Mac.

The more I have used the shipping version of LR, the more I am impressed. It has let me concentrate on the final image and not the tool. In general, it gets out of my way in the right places. I am still struggling to come up with a coherent image storage strategy. But, now that I’ve committed to LR, I can make some decisions that will help pin down that strategy.