If the £237.60 full retail cost of Adobe Lightroom 3.3 has deterred you from downloading the software and dipping your toe in the water, then Gary’s series of lectures over at SSDCC must have done a good job in persuading you that this is the future and that you will find it money well spent. Shopping around can reduce this outlay. The earlier version, Lightroom 3, is now available on the Web from £145.00 and would be a good starting point.

Digital capture encourages us to create more images, cheap external storage drives make it too easy to pile them up, so finding them some time later can become an increasing problem. Photoshop may have served us well over the years for our post processing but the additional ability to catalogue, keyword and rank our images, so that we can find them again quickly using its powerful search facility, puts Lightroom in a league of its own. If you want to stick with Photoshop for your image correction then you can specify it as your “External Editor” and pop backwards and forwards between the two programmes at a keystroke. The last of the season, it was fitting that, as a resume´, for this lecture, Gary stepped back into overview mode to discuss how to get the best out of Lightroom by setting up your own set post capture workflow.

So what does workflow mean? Say that you arrive home with 40 new images, put the kettle on, turn on your computer and open Lightroom. Then what do you do and in what order? That is your workflow. Don’t say that you don’t have one. It’s probably fill kettle, switch on, tea bag in cup, find spoon, milk out of fridge ready etc. Repetition creates a routine that becomes a no-brainer. What Gary was aiming to encourage was for you to set up your own similarly automatic sequence of procedures in Lightroom. This, presented as an ideal workflow, was screened as a flow-chart throughout the evening to accompany his lecture.

With over a dozen sets and sub-sets was all this a bit O.T.T ? If these procedures are all necessary, then would this not be a bit off-putting to those considering first-time purchase? As this was a comprehensive “best-practice” workflow it featured a number of procedures such as copyright creation and metadata that more casual users could, should they wish, live without. That said, in practice many operations, such as catalogue back-up, can be set to perform automatically on start-up or at set intervals easing the load. Designed by Adobe with the photographer specifically in mind and regularly upgraded, this ticks all the boxes.

Gary did his usual good job of working the audience, questioning and provoking responses to keep them fully involved in what, otherwise, could have been hard work. Taken each step at a palatable time, two hours of in depth tuition passed quickly and enjoyably. Teaching is an art and Gary a master of it. He reaped an appreciative response from our members.

Dick Loaring. Assistant Competition Secretary and Webmaster SSDCC