This year for the first time, I was able to attend Macworld for three days. Two of the days were spent in a workshop for Adobe Lightroom. The instructor was book author Mikkel Aaland. We were also treated to several guests speakers including the inventor of Lightroom and Leo Liporte, a renowned tech expert (although I never heard of him before). The classroom was huge, with the ability to hold over 100 students. But we only had 16 students in all. I guess with the bad economy, not many people would be able to afford the $825 class fee, but thanks to your tax-payer dollars, I can!!
I learned a little bit of Lightroom from my Scott Robert workshop back in April. Scott glossed over the entire application and mainly focused on his preset filters. Fortunately for me, Lightroom is so intuitive, you can just figure things out by playing with the sliders. But I knew there was so much more to learn, especially with version 2. This workshop promised to be an intensive, hands-on experience. I was not disappointed.
The biggest upgrade from version 1 is the ability to pinpoint specific areas for editing. In the past, I would've had to rely on Photoshop for those abilities and thus create new files with each iteration. Now, everything is all contained in Lightroom. And with it's non-destructive editing environment, there's no additional files to eat up drive space or keep track of. This is a huge benefit if you're organizing a large collection of photos.
So me being an amatuer hobbyist with no professional aspirations – what does this all mean to me? To me, Lightroom 2 allows me to get away with taking even lousier pictures! Yes, believe it or not, the photos out of my DSLR probably aren't much better than the pics in your point-and-shoot. 90% of my photos are either under-exposed, shot with wrong ISO, or have bad white balance. And of the good 10%, half of them are out of focus! Enter Lightroom.
Lightroom helps me adjusts the photos to what I remember seeing when shooting. It also offers some cool filters to make the photo artsy in case I can't salvage them. If the picture is lousy, I'll just purposely make it extra grainy or blow out the highlights and say "Yeah, I meant to do that." – Hey, what can I say? I'm an artist! :)
Furthermore, I can make you look better too. I'll clean up your zits and smooth your skin. Whiten your teeth and sharpen your eyes. Just last week I made one of the chiefs so happy because I made her look 10 years younger by softening her wrinkles. Now she only looks 60!
Lightroom is so amazing, I've transferred my entire iPhoto library into it and will no longer be using iPhoto. Yes, you heard me right. I'm dumping an Apple product for Lightroom. But remember, while iPhoto comes free with your new Mac, Lightroom is $299.
If you do decide to try Lightroom, let me know and I'll be happy to give you a quick tutorial.
Lightroom Free 30-day trial here
I'm sitting at the BART station going to Macworld and that's when I realize
I'm supposed to have some RAW photos available for the class.
Class started on Monday, but the Expo didn't start until Tuesday.
Pretty neat watching them set up. Plus I needed more RAW images.
I've never noticed the incredible architecture at the Moscone Center until now.
Desaturated all the colors except blue. Then used reverse clarity to soften it.
Shot this with camera pressed against the glass.
With all the colors, the photo looked too busy so I used a sepia filter.
What you get for $15. Asian Chicken salad. It was very good!
Someone told me that the latest fad was photographing your food. Is that right?
