Lightroom: Made for photographers

Albert Pedrosa
Photo mania

MY first experience with Lightroom was around 2007. It was the first version after a series of beta that came out. Like many Photoshop fanatics, I tried using the software the same way I used Photoshop. Obviously, it didn’t work for me because the software was never made to replace Photoshop. It was made for photographers.

Photoshop was developed in the late 80s when the scanner was still at the heart of every graphic designer’s workflow. The technology of replacing film with CCD sensor was far from being a reality. It took too much processing power to capture a shot in a fraction of a second. It normally took five minutes to scan a negative film and more if you set the scanner at high resolution.

Therefore, Photoshop was made to work with linear color data just the way bitmaps are produced by scanner using a CCD sensor. Then all the developments and features were added on top of the fundamental algorithm. After a decade of success in developments, the digital camera was now starting to become a reality. No worries, the introduction of digital camera outputs jpg files anyways.

As the digital camera technology advanced, the development took a different direction and utilized a different technology on sensors using CMOS and a different color data structure – a bitmap structure totally different from what Photoshop uses. Rather than changing the entire coding of Photoshop and start all over again, they decided to make Lightroom capable of bridging the incompatibility.

Lightroom is designed to make the most of your raw data from digital camera. In case you didn’t notice, the name Lightroom is opposite to darkroom. It’s like developing your pictures but doing it with the lights on. When using Lightroom, you’ll notice that the application calls your photos as negatives and editing as developed.

Much has been done with Lightroom after its conception as software to bridge the digital camera and Photoshop. Lightroom has now grown to perform the everyday tasks of a photographer. It now offers utilities and automated features to streamline the post production workflow of photographers. It’s actually cheap to go legit. For $9.99 per month, you get both Lightroom and Photoshop CC.

I doubted Lightroom when it first came out. Now, I can’t even imagine my workflow without it. Keep on shooting, everyone!

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