I’ve been shifting more and more work from Adobe Photoshop to Lightroom during the past two or three years. Still, every single image had to go through Photoshop at some point. But now, the latest beta version 3.0 of Lightroom, out for two weeks or so, has become so good though that I don’t need Photoshop anymore. Not only that. For the things I do in post processing, which is mostly local changes of contrast, Lightroom is intuitive and quick — no more tedious selections or messing with layers, for example. And, obviously, all edits are “non-destructive” and can be copied to similar images, which saves a lot of time.
If you’re on a Mac and dislike Adobe, the latest version of Apple Aperture is not bad at all and, in principle, does the same things as Lightroom; unfortunately, my up-to-date Macbook Pro, equipped with generous amounts of extra RAM, is brought to its knees by Aperture after only a little bit of editing; and, at least for my camera, the raw conversions, on a pixel level, are more refined with Lightroom no matter how much work I put into Aperture.
What am I to do with all that free time now? Take the bar exam? A Ph.D. in philosophy perhaps? Sleep more?