Further thoughts about Adobe Lightroom...

...while I'm waiting for the printer to finish.

So I'm printing an order, one which in the past would have been rather a PITA because it involves six different photos in four different formats or aspect ratios.

One image is to be done as an 8x10" portrait, a 5x7" portrait, and at 1.9x2.8" on a 4x6" sheet -- this to fit a custom commemorative frame from the 2010 Father-Daughter Dance.

The first two would be rather straight forward: load the original image, compose and finalize the crop, load the paper, do the page setup, do the print setup, print it.

But switching between the two crops always brought up a "Save the Changes?" dialog, and it was here I had to pay attention, because although many times I want to save changes, here I don't because all I'm doing is sending out a transient version to the printer.

But more than once I'd hit <Enter> reflexively, only to go "Oh cr*p..." because, no, I really didn't want to save that specific crop: I'd just over-written the original which is Not a Good Thing(tm).

But with Lightroom, there's no concept of "Save" or "Save as" at all - in fact there isn't even such a thing on any menu.

Which takes some getting used to.

Again, what Lightroom does is all "virtual" -- or, as I'd rather think of it, write to a database that records a list of state changes for a given image.

So there's no risk of saving some intermediate format of an image, because all I'd done was work through some new state changes, print that, and *poof* none of it really exists anywhere except the final print, and even those state changes can go away as soon as I need to edit the image a little.

Like print a 4x6" right after I've printed an 8x10".

Without having to pay a lot of attention to what I'm doing, because I'm probably doing something else on the other computer at the same time...

Very cool!

OK: Adobe Bridge...

...is exactly what I've been looking for to replace BreezeBrowser Pro and do all the front-end file management stuff before I even start into Adobe Lightroom.

I'm able to sit on one (or two, although not both at once) of my new Win 7 boxes and look at Canon RAW files that are on my file server, over my network.

I can move, delete, and re-name files at will.

And all much, much faster than I'd been able to do it on the file server box itself, which is running Ubuntu 10.10 and where I have to use gthumb to view files in the Canon RAW format via dcraw.

Totally cool!