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After adjusting your image in Develop you move on to output the results in either Slide Show, Print or Web. Each module offers a huge amount of control - This is great, but also one of Lightroom’s problems. There is just so much here - so many options in each module that while it’s aim is to simplify the process, it offers so many buttons and drop down panels that it ends up being just too complicated. Most images don’t need dozens of adjustments - If you’re a half decent photographer - and Lightroom is aimed at pros - you should only need a few little tweaks to each image before moving on. RawShooter managed that balance between having the tools you need easily accessible but keeping it simple, and was fast to use as a result, but Lightroom seems to miss the mark. In a word it is slow to use. Very slow. There are just so many choices to make, and it’s demand that you go through the import, catalogue, keywords routine every time you want to open an image really slows my work rate and raises by blood pressure. In time I’m sure I’ll get quicker, but for now I’m back to being a really slow worker again.
Of course there are parts of the process which are fast - cropping images is far faster than in Photoshop. With Lightroom if you straighten an image by cropping it, but don’t quite get it right first time, you don’t have to start the process again, you just click the crop tool and there is your cropping box just before you double clicked - adjust it and try again. It’s bliss. In fact the whole idea of storing adjustments as instruction sets rather than finished TIFs or JPEGs is that you can do this with any change you’ve made, they’re all still there just as you left them. That is great.
Like many photographers I like to print my pictures with a wide white border and put a thin black stroke around the image - This is something that I’ve always used Adobe Photoshop for, but I was surprised to find that the Print module in Lightroom can do all of that - in fact one of the “ooh” moments at the Adobe lecture was when it was explained to us that Lightroom does a far better job of this than Photoshop CS2, as it takes account of printer margins and resizes the image if necessary so that you never get only one border, or part borders, only what you intended, regardless of the stroke width. No more weird half or quarter borders !! That really would be excellent - So far all I’ve had from Lightroom are perfect borders.
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