Lightroom, where does it fit in?

Before I start on the up and coming weekly video tutorials, I want to mention a few things about where Lightroom fits into the family.

Firstly, it's been built from the ground up for photographers. You can use Photoshop if you like but not to the same speed as Lightroom. Being a database driven application, it moves at a blinding pace so best get your coffee and chocolate all set before you start as rendering is a thing of the past.

Lightroom has five main modules and these will expand to more in the future. But for now we have The Library for sorting, working with metadata and managing your entire library of images. And they can sit anywhere. On a local hard drive or any number of external hard drives.

The Develop module, for processing your RAW, JPEG and TIFF images. You can do all sorts of things in this module that doesn't require you exporting your images to Photoshop. 90% of your time you will find spent here for image manipulation. Maybe 10% of the time will require you sending the image to Photoshop for some deep pixel massaging.

The Slideshow module blows Bridge out of the water, I can't see why anyone needs bridge any longer. All Bridge does, Lightroom does better and faster.

The Print module is simply fantastic, no need to go through 35 steps to make sure all the setting are correct for printing at home as is the process in Photoshop, here in Lightroom we are in a better happy environment, it even smells better.

Finally we have the Web module. With a little digging you will be able to post galleries in html or flash form on the web, but I will be covering this later.

So follow me along next week.