Thursday, July 24, 2008

Should I be using Lightroom?

Small aside to begin with: not to overwhelm myself with blogs, I've chosen to make this blog a weekly (whereas the Forensic Photoshop blog tends to be almost daily).

Coming out of Julieanne Kost's Lightroom demo at Adobe last week, the majority of the questions centered around a single point, "should I be using Lightroom in my lab?" Let's begin to take a look at that question.

Lightroom provides a great workflow solution. It's great for photographers who are taking a ton of shots and then quickly share the best of these shots with clients. But what about us? Is it worth the investment in time and money?

Think about the way in which you interact with your "customers." Do they come in and wait for a finished product? Are they close by? Are they in a different part of the state? Do you need to securely transfer your finished work across the net?

Lightroom has it's pitfalls and its good points. The key is (as always) workflow. Take a look at your workflow. Examine how you interact with those that you support. Examine how you manage your files, from the shot to archive. How many images do you process in a given week? How fast do you need to get them out of your lab? What is your agency's retention policy? How do you interact with your discovery team in terms of e-discovery?

Put these things in the back of your mind as you work. Next week, we'll begin to look at Lightroom and explore the answers to "should I be using Lightroom."

Until then, enjoy.

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