[Leica] AARRGGHHH!!

[jbm at jbm.org (Jeff Moore)]

2010-11-24-02:01:11 Mark Rabiner:
> I do really think its just laziness to depend on a image sorting program to
> processs your images with. 

Now you're just being wilfully ignorant.  Yes, Lightroom includes
cataloguing features, but to impugn its image-processing chops just
because it includes more useful photographic-workflow features than
Photoshop does is clearly just buttheadedness.

It's true that you can still do more stuff to an image with Photoshop
than with Lightroom.  So sometimes, just sometimes, what needs to be
done to a given image exceeds what's built into Lightroom.  But for
the majority of cases, when what you need to do is in Lightroom, there
are two advantages:

  (1) Since Lightroom is a fresh redesign explicitly for photographers
      after having seen what photographers use Photoshop for, the
      action of the control is probably far more straightforward and
      similar to what an actual photographer in a darkroom would do
      than whatever dance one would need to do in Photoshop.  Yes,
      this is no advantage to someone whose brain has already been
      warped by Photoshop.

  (2) This is the big one: Any given series of adjustments done in
      Lightroom will have been done with the maximum quality, with the
      least processing-based destruction of the image.  This is not
      true of Photoshop.

      In Photoshop, if you tweak something in one direction, then
      tweak something else, then eventually tweak the early thing some
      more... well, each tweak applies mathematical algorithms to the
      data, each step introduces some rounding and imprecision.  It
      adds up.

      In Lightroom, there's a list maintained of all the tweaks.  It
      shows you a version as you tweak.  But whenever you tell
      Lightroom to produce a final output version - for the web, or
      for print, or whatever - the Lightroom engine takes a look at
      the whole history of adjustments, cancels out adjustments of the
      same control in opposite directions, reorders the operations for
      maximum quality, *then* applies them, optimally and at full
      resolution.

So: go ahead and use Photoshop if you must, for something you just
can't do in Lightroom of because you can't manage to make yourself
learn something new - but know that Lightroom is the highest-quality
image-processing path, and Photoshop is just a compromise you make
when you can't or won't use the best tool.

 -Jeff