Long ago, in a galaxy far, far away... ...or at least on a thread elsewhere about the Arcam D33, Ken and I started to chat about digital photography, so I thought I'd start a new thread over 'ere out of the Hifi pit...

Ken asked whether I knew if there was any compelling reason to switch from GIMP to Photoshop...

The honest answer is that I don't know, I use neither :-). I use Adobe Lightoom, which shares the "Photoshop" branding but is actually a different product. I could never get my head round Photoshop - all these layers and stuff just didn't make sense to me when I tried a (shh...) pirated copy years ago, and god forbid I should have to read an instruction book! I was chatting to a lady I know who used to be a graphic designer, and she said it makes perfect sense to her, so after a while we concluded that Photoshop makes intuitive sense when you're coming from a graphic design background, whereas Lightroom (a darkroom but with the lights on, geddit?) makes more sense to people who grew up in a darkroom. LR doesn't let you do the "creative" stuff that PS does - sticking your wife's head on Elle McPherson's body, or "enhancing" a scene by adding a gratuitous windmill or some clouds from a different day (I have a friend who's an "art" photographer, so forgive my cynicism) - but it does let you do the stuff that you can do in a darkroom, plus quite a bit more besides. So as well as basic exposure and contrast and colour balance, you can play with highlights/lights/shadows/darks separately, you can apply graduated filters, there's dodge and burn and limited paint-over-the-blemish functionality, hue/saturation/luminance for all colours, full colour-mix to B&W, etc, plus crop and rotate and (brilliant!) Lens Correction - full library support for most half-decent DSLR lenses, correcting distortion and vignetting and aberration. You can even do different colour balance in different bits of the picture[1]! Go read the sales literature :-). If you're interested then I'll happily post a couple of before/afters...

It's also - at least from v3 onwards - got decent control over the printing back-end, so you can lay out multiple arbitary images on a sheet and print at whatever resolution you feel appropriate. It's a professional tool so it supports colour profiling all the way through if you want it to (I calibrate my monitor - very worthwhile - but that's all I can be bothered to do, the printer has to take its chances :-)).

Its tagging and library functions are good, and (from v4) it's got geotagging which is a bit buggy at the moment, one lives in hope of a few v4.x releases over the next few months... The .x releases are always free downloads, it's just the major release numbers which cost money.

Personally I think it's a brilliant tool - and that's not something I say easily about much software, since it's my trade - but whether it's better than GIMP, I can't say. But it ain't a light user of CPU - doing the full-resolution renders and changing the picture on the fly as you slide the control knobs around does seem to take a good bit of grunt... Hence the hyperthreaded quad-core i7 and the SSD for cache... Which is a bit OTT, it's not that bad, but I should be future-proof...

I got here by being persuaded that I shouldn't let the camera produce JPGs, but should shoot raw and then convert to JPG on the PC[2]. Once I realised that this path worked, I then looked for a raw-to-jpg converter. A well-regarded (and free!) one at the time was RawShooter, so I used it. Eventually I paid the sixty quid and upgraded to RawShooterPro; and I was happy. The guys behind RawShooter, having used their customers as beta testers (that's why the basic version was free, there was no hidden agenda) sold their company and raw-rendering IP to Adobe. Adobe wrapped it up in a much better UI and cataloguing package and called it Lightroom. Existing paid-up RawShooterPro customers got LR v1 for free. Over time I've paid £60 to upgrade from v1 to v3, and recently another £60 to go from 3 to 4.

Hope some of this helps, or at least stimulates further discussion...

Cheers
Pete


[1] Couldn't see why that might be useful, then saw a photographer posting somewhere that it was fantastic because he'd done some shots looking out past a wall with some tungsten-lit art on it into the garden beyond. The art mirrored the garden, or something, don't ask me, but anyway it let him get a believable colour balance in both wall and garden...

[2] For any readers for whom this is so much gobbledegook, here's an analogy. JPG is the MP3 of the photographic world. It's a lossy compression system based on perceptual coding. The camera sensor records loads of fine detail, especially in shadows. The JPG algorithm decides what the eye will be able to see, and chucks the rest. Fair enough. So you take your JPG, and decide it's a bit dark, so you try to brighten it up. Oh, but look, all the detail which you hoped would emerge from the shadows has already been lost, all you find there is noise. Bummer. Shooting raw means uploading the raw sensor data to the computer, where you can mess about with colour, brightness, contrast, saturation, what have you, based on the full dataset that was captured by the camera. Then, and only when you've got an image you're happy with, THEN you convert it to a JPG...

Aaargh, shift lenses. Never had a go, when I was growing up my parents were wedding photographers so I saw lots of that sort of kit, but not the more esoteric stuff...

Lightroom does do the perspective-shift stuff, it just slipped my mind 'cos I don't use it much, I tend to photograph gardens and people, mostly. Diary stuff. That said, I did play with the perspective-shift to straighten up some photos I did of a birthday party, which was inconsiderately (for the photographer...) held in an old timber barn, beams at all angles everywhere so you *had* to get things straight. If you're very subtle about it, you can help your subject lose a couple of pounds as well... :-).

I've no idea how LR compares to UFRaw as a converter. It'll be different, that seems to be a constant in these things. One would hope, with all the IP involved, that the commercial product would be a bit better, but then again...

If you wanna find out what - if anything - the money buys you, then ping me a PM from the forum, I'll reply with a proper email addy, then you can post me a few raw files and I'll be happy to have a crack at 'em and post 'em back to you.... I'm not working at the mo (semi-voluntarily) so I have time to play and have fun...

Cheers
Pete