It's somewhat of an orthogonal product. Lightroom is a combination of a very good RAW converter (which also works with JPEGs), and an image organiser. It does non-destructive editing, but is mostly targeted at whole-image adjustments (exposure, colour balance, sharpness, noise reduction, etc., etc.) It does have some local editing capability, but for serious work there you are better off using a tool designed for that purpose.
I use LightRoom in conjunction with Photoshop Elements. There are a few things I can't do quite as well (or as easily) as I would be able to do with the full Photoshop Suite, but not enough for me to be tempted to pay the price difference. On Mon, Jun 14, 2010 at 02:02:35PM -0500, Gonz wrote: > Thanks John, good info. So everyone keeps mentioning LightRoom here. > Is this preferable to PhotoShop, or an orthogonal product altogether? > > rg > > > On Mon, Jun 14, 2010 at 1:59 PM, John Francis <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > The biggest drawback with laptops is the maximum memory configuration; > > apart from that they are more than good enough for most purposes. > > > > My work machine (a Compaq 8710w) supposedly can support 4GB memory sticks, > > so in theory can support 8GB of memory. ?But 4GB memory sticks are hard to > > find (and 32-bit Windows won't address more than 3GB anyway), so typical > > notebooks (2 DIMM slots) can often have a limit of 4GB physical RAM. > > > > You should be able to find a Core 2 Duo processor (speed 2.2 - 2.5 GHz) > > and a dedicated graphics card (ATI or nVidia) and 500GB of had disk space > > at a reasonable price; we paid roughly $700 for an HP with a 17" display > > six months ago, and prices generally go down (just like camera bodies). > > [We actually paid a little more than that, but that was to get a second > > hard drive and Windows 7 64-bit Professional] > > > > The newer processors (i5, etc.) are even faster, but (of course) more > > expensive. ?I haven't found LR to be sluggish on my systems. ?But the > > memory size can be an issue, especially working with very large images > > such as stitched panoramas; the I/O bandwidth from notebook drives is > > not as good as you can get from a SCSI RAID array. > > > > > > > > > > -- > > PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List > > [email protected] > > http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net > > to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and > > follow the directions. > > > > > > -- > -- Reduce your Government Footprint > > -- > PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List > [email protected] > http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net > to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow > the directions. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
