Comments on: Holiday Gear Guide: Gift Ideas Under $200

By: Martin Melnick

Martin Melnick — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 16:09:00 +0000

I love the lightroom to photoshop workflow. Doing a one light quickly in LR and then editing it in photoshop or saving the tiff for later is an amazingly streamlined process. My only beef with LR 4 is that I prefer the gui and exposure tools in 3 versus 4 (although you can change those on a case by case basis at the bottom).

By: Branden Hughes

Branden Hughes — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 07:47:00 +0000

I am having a 50% off fine art photography sale for black friday.
http://brandenhughes.zenfolio.com/blog/2012/11/black-friday-art-sale-one-day-only

By: Mike_Kelley

Mike_Kelley — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 07:41:00 +0000

Aperture > Lightroom. I am absolutely devoted to Aperture and for less money I think it does a just as good, if not better job. And I don’t get the slowness that LR has given me.

By: Patrick Hall

Patrick Hall — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 01:28:00 +0000

I think we need to define “fast or slow”. LR4 does run slow for me (similar setup as Tam but with only 12 gigs of RAM), but slow for me means 2 seconds between images after rendering previews overnight (yeah it takes hours to render previews for 3000 D600/D800 files). Once you calculate say 10 seconds an image for basic adjustments, those 2 seconds between images really adds up. I really can’t say if LR3 was faster than LR4 because I had 12-16mpx images on LR3 where now I have 24-36mpx images on LR4 but it def seems slow to me. However, if we take into account Nikon’s Capture NX software….then yes LR4 is blazing fast!

By: Patrick Hall

Patrick Hall — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 01:25:00 +0000

PhotoMechanics is the software used by Sports Illustrated right? I remember seeing them cull images on that during the Fstoppers video we did with them and it looks so archaic. I def would not want to trade LR for PM if it’s the same software. Might be good for studio/commercial shoots where you just need the best images but for weddings that require slight adjustments on each frame that would be a nightmare.

By: Patrick Hall

Patrick Hall — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 01:23:00 +0000

I think the issue is that many people are claiming LR3 is faster than LR4. I have a SSD and drobo and run LR4 on a PC with 12GB of RAM and it is still pretty sluggish (about 2 seconds between images). I can’t remember if LR3 was that much faster but I also didn’t have D600/D800 files back when I was using 3.

As a wedding photographer, trust me, you only want to go through images once. Loading 2000-4000 images into another program like PM, rating the best, and then reloading them into LR is not an effective workflow. SLR Lounge has an excellent series on LR that shows how to speed things up quite a bit but hopefully Adobe will do even more to improve the next versions of LR4 or even LR5.

By: Brian Keyes

Brian Keyes — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 00:34:00 +0000

Tam, if you’re having speed issues, you should try using the 2010 (LR3) process as default in LR4. Processing speeds should reflect the change. Enjoy ;)

By: Frederick Alfaro

Frederick Alfaro — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 23:43:00 +0000

My suggestion is Break down your library file by year or month based on often you shoot, Some studio/weding shooters could even have one per client/shoot it really speeds up and a lot of the time you wont be working on old images that are using up ram slowing everything else down

also get a SSD so much faster in every aspect, i got a small one and a drobo external via firewire 800 and am about to get the drobo mini thunderbolt for “active” work.

By: Tobert55

Tobert55 — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 23:12:00 +0000

your telling bullshit tam… sorry but that´s the truth.

maybe 10 % experience slow performance.. the majority (including myself) have absolutely no performance issues.

and i have to process around 1000-1500 images a day.

photo ninja is slow compared to LR.. i guess it is because it uses very powerfull algorithm to demosaice the RAW files. sometimes and for some images it´s worth to wait a bit longer.

anyway on my system LR 4.x is as fast as LR 3.6.

to say, per se, LR 4 is slow is just a naiv rant.
it is for some but not for the majority.

By: Chad Andreo-Photo

Chad Andreo-Photo — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 20:46:00 +0000

Same here. There is no reason that Adobe should not be able to make it run as efficiently as LR3.
Like others have said, get Photo Mechanics. Its that good.