PhotoWalkPro

I hear a lot of people talking about how Lightroom has supplanted the Bridge as their program of choice for handling all of their image needs and workflow.  I have to admit that I use Lightroom and it does have some butt-kicking features for photographers.  I think that the reason Lightroom is so good is that Adobe finally involved the public in the development process.  It’s hard to give the people what they want if you don’t ask them first.  That being said, I still find it hard to give up my Bridge.  Sure, it’s still a little slow to load and there are features that I find completely ridiculous like the magnifying loupe  (Hey Adobe, I want to zoom in on the whole image, not just a little piece).  But all of that aside, it beats Lightroom out in a couple of categories.

First and foremost, sometimes when I want to open an image in Photoshop, I want it opened without having to save a whole new copy that I may never use.  Maybe I want to work an image and post it to my blog.  Lightroom only gives me one choice for a raw image and that is to make a new PSD file that Lightroom automatically saves into the same folder.  So now I have this PSD that I fiddle with and have to save as a jpeg for uploading to my blog.  That means I now have 3 copies of the image on my hard drive.  The raw file, the PSD, and the jpeg, all taking up valuable bits and bytes on my already crowded drive. Now I have to go back and delete the PSD to save space since I never wanted it in the first place.  A little suggestion to Adobe for the next version of Lightroom, give me a jpeg option under  Edit in Adobe Photoshop CS3.

Another great thing that the Bridge lets me do is view and work with images that don’t reside on my drive and, more importantly, I don’t want to have to import to work with.  If I want to do anything with an image in Lightroom I have to import it first.  Of course this is because you aren’t really changing anything in Lightroom that actually effects the image, it just holds those changes and applies them when you export the image.  That’s a great concept except sometimes someone hands me a thumbdrive containing an image that they want adjusted and printed.  Guess where I’m going first, yup, right to the Bridge to pop open some thumbnails of those images.  Then I am going to right-click and open those images in Camera Raw.  And I’m going to do all of this without saving the images to my hard drive first. The same holds true if I only shoot a couple of images that I need to work with right away but don’t care about saving for later.  I don’t always shoot two or three hundred images at a time that I need to store and sort and adjust.

Finally, there are those great Photoshop goodies like Contact Sheet II, Image Processor, Merge to HDR, Photomerge, and others that are all available to me right inside the Bridge by going to the Tools/Photoshop menu.  I use these all the time and I love the fact that I don’t have to open Photoshop first, find my images, and then apply the tools when I can do it all from the Bridge.

So do I love Lightroom?  Absolutely!  It is a remarkable program that has revolutionized the workflow process for photographers.  Is it everything I need in my workflow?  More often than not, the answer is no.  Which is why I am still a huge fan of the Bridge and will remain so for some time to come.

Related posts:

1. Why I Still Use the Bridge (Sometimes)
2. Quick Image Prep in Lightroom
3. Bridge your way to organized images
4. Late Breaking News
5. Lightroom Gallery change for the better

This entry was posted on Monday, December 3rd, 2007 at 10:48 pm and is filed under Image Processing, Lightroom, Photoshop. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.