Lightroom with Scanned files??

Any opinion or experience with Lightroom with respect to digital files from scanning?

I use lightroom with my scans…. For whatever reason some “develop” features are either less effective or non-working (ie. recovery)... so I end up in PS more often than with my digital files. I scan to tiff.

With film, I use LR more for the database features (key-words/folders, caption, etc.)...

Thanks, Mark.

Have you tried HDR multiple exposures in LR? In other words, if I understand correctly you can create HDR multiple exposure images in LR and then combine them into one image.

Although the external hard drive question is the one I need to deal with when I have two new external hard drives (Can be W98SE and Vista) and one old Maxtor drive attached to the W98SE machine, this software question is just as important to me.

I don´t like lightroom for scans cause i have to take care of how to sharpen. I tried lightroom but the look of the pics i retouched in photoshop are better.

Thanks, Hernan, for your opinion.

According to this review, Lightroom does not handle high-resolution 35mm scans.

Would database use in Lightroom be also affected by this limitation?

PS CS3 has HDR capabilities but if you dig around the web there’ll be plenty of HDR tutorials using just layers and some trickery (masks, dissolves, opacity…). Though I imagine you’ll be asking for trouble looking to do it with scans – but hopefully i’m wrong.
I’m trying to get comfy with LR right now and not entirely sold on it. Photomechanic has infinitely quicker previews and is also quicker and more convenient on keywording. Because of its quicker previews i reckon that PM is possibly a better first editor (sorting the possibles from the crap).

Also LR uses Adobe Camera Raw to convert Raw to Tiff/jpg. I prefer the results of Digital Photographer Professional (free with all Canon 5d) when used without any presets. Getting the right dev settings on LR can probably produce something very close but they may need tweaking for each individual shot from a shoot, and I’ve yet to be convinced of it being possibility whatever about its practicality.

What makes LR really exciting though is the slideshow and web options. It’ll make a slideshow or web gallery really easily for you.

That review seems a bit light to me. What size are your scans??

Thanks, Con, for your perspective.

Lately I have had the lab scan small (~18Mb) for me, but I have made scans exceeding 100Mb, particularly from my Mamiya 6 frames using my Artixscan 120TF.

For a slideshow, I have Soundslide. What kind of a web gallery will it make?

if you’re only concerned about scans i’d stick to PShop. For any spotting you’ll need to do it makes mroe sense and there the additional speed of it. You can do more in PS then LR by a long way. But maybe not all is so necessary.

The slideshow function just creates HTML from your images once you selected bg colour, grid, text… super handy if you needed to upload some quick reference galleries quickly for client.

Cant do too much with 18mb scans apart from web and small print, and 100mb is massive (8/16bit?) I suppose Tomoko you need to figure out what workflow best suits your needs and what you shoot.

Con,

Are any of your galleries on your website made with LR? Please point to which so that I can look at them.

I also have made and can make 4000 dpi scans from 35mm which would be about 60Mb.
I`ll read up more on LR and look at the amount of money I have in my business bank account to make a decision.

ha, me website was the cheapest option available and is kinda wincingly poor quality, but if you ignore it it helps :)

LR Galleries
http://www.adobe.com/designcenter/lightroom/articles/lir1am_webgallery.html
think this is 3rd party http://www.lightroomgalleries.com/index.php
http://www.lightroomgalleries.com/gallerysamples/LRGComplete254/
have a dig around for examples.

If you’re mostly working with scans i wouldnt bother with LR, just stick to PS and maybe PMechanic

Isn`t PhotoMechanic for digital camera files and not for scanned images?

I use Lightroom to work with the files I have scanned and think it works really well. I use Photoshop to spot out dust and scratches but LR for color and tone. LR is good when you are organizing a project that contains images shot on film and digital.

beta 2.0 version free download now

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/lightroom/

Thanks, Con, for the link for free download. I am getting my “external” drives today, and I hope to get to try the beta 2.0.

Preston, how big a file are you using from film?

I think they’re about 40 megabytes. I work with TIFFs in LR, edit them, and then output as JPEGs.