Digital Asset Management – Part III

… or How to Cope in the Digital Age of Photography

It was a glorious morning on the Outer Banks as I began typing this installment of the blog. We were meeting our students at breakfast and heading down to Ocracoke, since we were supposed to get rain later in the week.

As I finished this article, adding recent shots from the Outer Banks, we had just returned from one of our favorite locations where we got some great photographs in the fog (I'll post a couple of those next time)! As we say on our website, Mother Nature has a mind of her own, and we try to photograph her in all of her moods.

Now, back to the article!

Photoshop vs. Lightroom

There are a couple of very big differences between Photoshop and Lightroom. Photoshop was created for graphic artists, and as such does not always intuitively meet the needs of photographers. Lightroom, on the other hand, was designed by photographers for photographers.

Photoshop can deal with layers, photo merging, and other more sophisticated aspects of imaging. That said, the breadth of other adjustments in Lightroom exceeds that allowed in Camera Raw. Any tweaks you make in Camera Raw in Photoshop stay with the image in the metadata, but if you have more adjustments to make than Camera Raw affords, you have to save your tweaked image as a PSD or TIF/TIFF file, doubling the room that files takes upon your computer because of essentially being there twice — once as a raw (DNG) file, and once as a PSD or TIF.

I personally love the additional tweaking capabilities in Lightroom's Develop module, since I rarely have to save a file as a PSD or TIF. I can usually achieve the effect I need in Lightroom without going to Layers. There are exceptions, of course. This is not one of them!

From Lightroom, I can also create sized and sharpened photographs for our website or for our kids on Shutterfly, or even for our workshop group shots. I can also create slide shows for the workshops or photo meetings and print out contact sheets for clients, to name just a few tasks. Now, I can even make decent prints from Lightroom, although for really large prints, Photoshop is probably the preferable program.

There is one really cool feature of Lightroom I love — the ability to make virtual copies. On this last workshop, we returned from one of my favorite locations for funky photographs and created yet another image of a derelict steel boat rotting at the edge of the harbor. First, I added some black as well as my other standard adjustments. I then added a few other tweaks to bring out the faded splendor of this relic, just as one might have done in the old darkroom days. I got looking at it and realized it might also make a great black and white.

Hmmm. Will this have a sepia tone or a slightly bluish cast to echo the deep blue of the sea that put the boat there? I made several virtual copies of the photo as I had processed it thus far, then experimented, giving each of the virtual copies a different black-and-white treatment. And I didn't have to save any of them as PSDs or TIFs! Here are two of the possibilities, and they have not yet been tweaked after simply selecting one of the Lightroom presets.

I should note here that in order to save items such as virtual copies, one really should save the photo and its virtual copies as a catalog that you can then import into your desktop when you get home, or visa versa if you are headed off on a trip.

Again, back up, back up, back up. The idea of trying to replicate all that work I did in post-processing is not appealing!

So, for your more advanced image tweakers, you will probably want Photoshop along with Lightroom, but for those of you who are new to the digital world, Lightroom is a great place to start. Who knows? You may never have want or need of Photoshop.

And for those who are already working with Lightroom, Lightroom 2.1 is a big improvement over Version 2 and a huge improvement over the original program.

In Part IV, I'll deal with finding all your photographs of Great Aunt Minnie taken over the years or all your vertical photographs of lighthouses across the country.

For more information about our workshops, go to our Barefoot Contessa Photo Adventures website.

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