Bike maintenance. Apparently when you clean bearings that were coated in gummy-bear consistency grease, they stop squeaking. Good to know.
—
I downloaded Lightroom today. I had it a few years ago and didn’t like it then. But today I saw a how-to video on timelapses, and they used Lightroom to do batch edits. It was pretty slick so I figured I’d give it another try.
The interface border-lines on cluttered, but only because it packs a million and half features all onto one screen. There are so many on/off switches, hover states/actions, buttons, icons, pulldowns, sliders, and menus. It’s almost overwhelming.
Its features are mostly split into two main categories: photo organization & storage, and photo editing. Most of the extraneous organization features are lost on me, probably because I’m such a casual photographer and I don’t have massive archives of images that need organizing. I don’t ever need to change metadata, add keywords, color-code, or otherwise categorize my images. In the past, the only similar Bridge feature that I’ve used is the color coding to mark to-do’s and potential come-back-to’s. Though I have no use for the rest, I can definitely see their possible usefulness. Just not for me.
As for the editing, the power is incredible. I’m still learning how to coax the look I’m going for out of the program, but a learning-curve is to be expected. Again, the editing tools border-line on cluttered, and I think that’s due to them all being available at one time in a single really tall sidebar. Each section of editing tools does expand/collapse, but that only makes finding the right tool harder. At this point, I feel like Photoshop Camera Raw’s tabbed interface is much more user-friendly. But maybe I’m missing something in Lightroom. Perhaps in time I’ll find the advantage of its UI.
I only ever hear great things about it, so I’ll keep giving it a chance. We’ll see how long that lasts.
No Comments »
