lightroom - photo mechanic compatibility

I am pretty sure you can set your PM prefs to write info as xmp sidecar files. Check your prefs and set that option and LR should read them. Once you really get going with LR, you may find that you don’t need PM. LR’s captioning and keywording capabilities are pretty good.

jack

brilliant – that worked, if not for the colors, for the stars at least. Thanks!
Maybe I’ll get used to doing caps and keywords as I get more familiar with the program, but definitely for editing I am not thrilled, and it’s also loading much too slow for that, at least on the computer I am working on (MacBook).

The caption and keywording capabilities of LR are more or less okay but not nearly as good and efficient as in PM. For one the large overview of the IPTC screen is so much better in PM. The caption field in LR (When pre-formatting IPTC on import) is only one line high so it does not give an overview of what you have typed and also it is not possible to make any line breaks by hitting the enter key because that will ‘ok and close’ the whole IPTC screen. That s*cks in my opinion. The level of automation in PM (if you use the ’variables’) is simply brilliant. Because you can cross-feed multiple IPTC fields with the variables codes, the chance on making failures is much less.

For example in the ‘IPTC Stationary Pad’ I have put (variables) date codes in the caption field that automatically gets the creation date from the camera exif. Also the field codes of the place and country are in the caption field so when I fill in the particular IPTC fields the content of those fields are automically transfered to the caption field when ingesting. One of the IPTC fields I have reserved for the naming system of my pictures, which is automated as well. All i have to do is fill in a short (usually about 6 caracters) naming code and a sequential filename (XXXXXX20080324-001) is automatically generated on ingest. All this saves up time but more important it reduces the chance on making failures in the IPTC info. Since all of this is not possible in LR I can hardly say that it’s IPTC capability levels up with PM. A pity though that indeed you would need sidecar files to get tag and rating info transfered along to LR. Since I don’t like the idea of needing extra (XMP) files along side the raw’s I rather choose to convert files to DNG, which does not need sidecar files to inherit metadata. But I only do that when needed

As a tip to Katja: What I do is I make a fast pre-selection of ‘keepers’ in PM by tagging them. Then I delete all the untagged files. Then I import the keepers to LR and make the final selection there before developing them. It’s just a way but it works pretty well for me.

I kind of see Lightroom and Photomechanic as different tools for different workflows. For me (running on a PC), Lightroom has never been stable or fast. But when it works, it’s very useful for minor tweaks outside of photoshop.

Photomechanic on the other hand is my go-to tool for lean&mean caption and transmit. If you’re on deadline and need to edit a take, caption and transmit quick, there really isn’t a better tool out there.

Never been a fan of Lightroom and today I got to see exactly why. Shot an event along with another photographer. She uses iView Media Pro and Lightroom, I use Photo Mechanic and Photoshop. I handed in my stupid stuff, went to dinner, had a lovely time with a friend, came back, she was still finishing.

He Stupid. Did she shoot RAW and did you shoot stupid Jpegs? That makes a different too off course…

As i see it there is only one single use for Lightroom/apperture outside the efficient workflow of PhotoMechanic and PhotoShop: To make color- and exposure-corrected contactsheets and webgalleries. Not really worth the money in my opinion.

No idea what she was shooting Michel but yes, 99.99999% of my stupid shots are JPGs. Agree with Ty and since I never color correct contacts or web galleries, I don’t need Lightroom.

from using it over the past few days, my hunch is that I agree, LR is a great tool for making overall color corrections to a large number of RAW files, which I happen to be in need of right now, but I can’t see it replacing my Photomechanic – to – Photoshop workflow at this stage. Maybe I am missing something. But for cases where I need tho show a large number of nominally toned thumbnails to a client, or need to hand over RAWs altogether, this seems the only way.

originally i thought lightroom would be some sort of magical entity that would also cook me breakfast but all i ended up using it for is archiving. do all my tagging and sorting in photomechanic, editing in photoshop and then latter add all the files into lightroom so i have a nice searchable database of different versions. if someone knows of better searchable archiving software i would be happy to stop using lightroom as it is a little clunky and i never use any of its other “features”.