brenda.landrum | photographer

I have been reading a lot online about the *big* (I guess) controversy with photographers debating on what program is better…Lightroom or Aperture. Months ago (I think it was June) I downloaded the 30-day trials of Lightroom and Aperture to try them out. I started using Lightroom first because I trust Adobe to make a fabulous product and they did. I then started using Aperture and instantly hated it. It just didn’t flow well with how I work on my images. So I stayed with Lightroom and bought it on Amazon for a fantastic price of $199!!! Man, I wish I would of done this post months ago so others could get that price because I just checked on Amazon and it’s now at $292. Bummer for you….

I love this software and highly recommend it to anyone! I use both Mac and PC right now and the fact that you get both platforms was wonderful for me. I do all of my image editing on my MacBook Pro (I’m a recent Mac convert) because I need to be portable with my lovely 2 year old running all over the place. I use my PC to do my personal image editing. This program is very easy to navigate around and has made my RAW image workflow go so much faster then what I was doing before. Here is my BEFORE workflow:

Download images from CF card to PC – Use Canon ZoomBrowser to do a rough edit of images – Transfer images to RAW Image Task and adjust exposure and white balance on each image and then convert to TIFF (this process took forever) – Open Photoshop and open each individual image to verify quality and to do adjustments on. Ok, as you can image this process took me days to do. I hated sitting down to do this because it would take me forever to get through a set of images. My turn around time was horrible!

Here is my workflow NOW!

Open Lightroom – insert CF card into reader and tell Lightroom to Import while telling it where I want the files to go and rename the files with my copyright meta data – I can verify quality and adjust all at the same time while flagging my favorites – I can get through 100 images in 2 hours! (keeping in mind that I’m interrupted a lot!)

I then use the same program to make my web galleries for my clients to view (it even FTP’s it for me), print, and create my blog files. I can’t say enough about this program and how it’s changed my life by not taking up so much time. My clients last weekend were able to see their web galleries in 4 days. Enough said!

(disclaimer: clients that are reading this, I do not guarantee this turn around time……….. my first job is Mom. )