Christmas left less time for photography this year, with the obvious and welcome distractions of family and festive preparations. The result being that photo editing and website updating has fallen on the backburner. I am now in late January beginning to return to digital processing of images from my November trip. Finally however I am on the last 100 or so images and so will shortly have final selections of the real “keepers” to make. More images from Montana and Wyoming will be posted on the site late February, together with the long overdue additions to the Florida and Chilterns galleries.

My workflow has changed considerably this year with the introduction of Lightroom by Adobe. I had always used Photoshop with its rather pathetic file manager – Bridge. Finding Bridge lacking any true ability to manage a database of digital files I quickly adopted Lightroom during its beta testing period. Lightroom with its latest revisions is a pretty complete product and now proves indispensable for managing my image files, assigning metadata and keywords, sorting and selecting a first cut of images and for initial pre-production image correction. Its weak points are arguably limited to lousy image capture/pre-print sharpening capabilities and a lack of soft proofing, but these are work in progress for the Lightroom team for a future release. It also doesn’t like Photoshop files that are saved in anything other than RGB. This is a little bizarre as quite often files are required in CMYK format and Lab is also a very convenient mode for certain Photoshop adjustments. In order to make such files readable by Lightroom they have to be converted back to RGB and this means that layers have to be flattened losing the ability to revisit at a later stage and alter earlier adjustments. It just isn’t joined up thinking and all because one of the Lightroom creators is on a single-minded crusade to keep all workflow within RGB. Let’s hope that enough photo professionals put pressure on Adobe to abandon this daft Lightroom restriction.
"Xmas 2007"

Small whinges aside, Lightroom has speeded up my image file management – distractions accepted and it has made some tasks a whole lot easier. Each Christmas, for example, I prepare a family Christmas card that features one of my images on the front and a montage of family photos taken over the last year on the back of the card. Preparing a dozen or so images for the back of the card involves a whole bunch of selection, sorting and resizing operations before they can be compiled into the finished montage. I used to do this work within Photoshop and whilst it is more than capable of this, it was never really that fast because it wasn’t really that easy to batch the files in Photoshop and selecting and choosing files from Bridge was just plain “cluncky”. Lightroom however has changed all this allowing quick sorting and selection of the photos to be used and then rapid exporting of the images to a size, resolution and format of my choosing, ready for compilation on the back page in Photoshop. Quite literally several hours condensed to 30 minutes.