Hey all --
I'm new to the list, and thought I'd chime in about Lightroom and why we're not
using it here at The Minneapolis Institute of Arts. We have a four-person Photo
Services department, and we keep six Macs in service as digital imaging
machines. We use PCs for email and other museum business like our collections
management database, and yes, it's a pain to go back and forth.
We use Capture One Pro for shooting because we have Phase One cameras, then
finish our images in both Photoshop and Adobe's Bridge. Bridge is handy for
browsing images and adding metadata, and provides a great interface to run
Photoshop processes like resizing images or changing color spaces.
I downloaded the first beta versions of Lightroom available from Adobe to see
if they could add anything to our process, and ran into a few snags that kept
me from using it in our multi-machine environment.
First off, Lightroom is different from Adobe's Bridge in that it needs to keep
its previews and other image-related data in a central cache. In Bridge you can
keep cached files in the same folder with the images, so the program doesn't
have to redraw previews if you access files from different machines. We end up
moving folders full of files back and forth all the time, and this shortcoming
(in my opinion) is pretty major. The cache file doesn't just keep the image
previews; I think it also stores things like ratings, labels, and post-capture
rotations.
The second major snag I hit is that color management in Lightroom is not as
transparent as it is in Photoshop, and I can't make it do what I want it to.
Lightroom would be great for printing a series of proofs with text on them
("This is MIA Accession number xxxx.xx, printed on Epson Premium Luster paper
on the Epson 2200"), but in the tests I did I couldn't control the color
management like I can in Photoshop.
I think Lightroom will find a place among Adobe's other offerings, and I bet it
will undergo some changes before it's available for purchase, but I don't know
if it will take the place of Photoshop or Bridge for us here.
Hope this helps.
Charles Walbridge
Associate Photographer
Minneapolis Institute of Arts
www.artsmia.org
