D. C. Southwick

Oh my gosh, WordPress 2.5 rocks my socks!

This post now has an image!

Just some quick thoughts on Lightroom vs. Bridge.

First of all, its Lightroom vs. Bridge and not Lightroom vs Bridge & Photoshop. Photoshop in integrated equally into both applications. Anyways, on to the comparision!

A word on who I am:

I am a digital photography student, I take a relatively small number of photos, and edit them individually. I own a macbook, with a 13.3″ screen (yea, don’t tell me, I know.) I do my class work on a G5 with more healthy screen real estate. I have used all of these applications for at least 2 weeks.

I will start with Aperture, as I have used it the longest:

What I like most about Aperture is it’s organization. I love the vault. Its a great idea that all apps should have (see Lightroom.)  Stacking. What a genius idea! Aperture is simple to import, and quick to grasp.

What I dislike most about Aperture is the speed. On a macbook, even with only a few thousand photos, it is slow. Browsing, importing, editing; all slow. As I said, I only have a 13″ screen, and much of that space is wasted with Aperture.

ON TO BRIDGE!

I have spent the least time with Bridge, having only acquired CS3 recently. Bridge is AWESOME compared to CS2. All the info about my photos at my fingetips. The best thing about bridge is its integration with the rest of Adobe’s studio. You can really tell it is meant to be the connecting link between apps. Unfortunately, I rarely use more than Photoshop. I use Bridge at my schools workstations, as it connects to all those pesky network drives without complaint.

What I dislike the most is that you can’t just have Bridge. You have to be working in Photoshop to do the actual editing. Bridge is only a photo organizer. This is a really lame complaint, but again, lost screen space.

AND FINALLY

Lightroom! I’ve only been using Lightroom for a few months, and I’m in love! It is F A S T. Even with all my raws. I love it! I feel I get the most bang per pixel with Lightroom, and it integrates nicely with Photoshop to boot.

Things I wish sucked less:  Lightroom’s web export is virtually useless if you use any other web platform (e.g. WordPress+Gallery2?) The ‘backup’ feature in Lightroom is not nearly as refined as Aperture’s Photo Vault. Also, Importing and Exporting is lacking options. For example: you can’t erase you CF card after you import your raws. Wtf? That seems like a simple thing to add.

Summary:

I use Lightroom, for its conservation of my scarce screenspace, and its lightening fast photo organization and tagging abilities. Now to find a way to migrate my Aperture vault to Lightroom…

I just watched a film titled Oldboy. I highly recommend you watch it. It’s the best film I’ve seen in quite some time. Watch it with subs, because dubs just stink.