Back in February I wrote a little lament about having to upgrade my software. Well, four months later, it's time for an update.
I have indeed moved my main computer to Lightroom Four so that it can handle images from my Nikon D800. It's an awesome program, but even version 4.1 is so slow that the thought of importing more than a dozen photos into it makes we want to cry. I've left my laptop running Lightroom three-point-something, which is fine for my little Canon S100.
I'm also working my way through a trial of "DxO Optics", which is an incredibly sophisticated program that does most of its work automatically. It looks like this will become my new intake program, letting me see a better-than-original redering of each photo, use some of its tools and tricks, and then export only the best candidates to Lightroom Four. That Adobe software can then add its own controls to the mix, and remains my foundation for organizing and printing photos.
Driving all of this right now is my upcoming jaunt to New York City. On my last trip, to the same place and on the same weekend, I took about four hundred photos using my manual-focus and manual-advance film rangefinder. With my D800 I'm going to carry enough power and memory for about two thousand images – I don't need to use it all, but I don't plan on missing many opportunities. So my workflow needs to be up to the task, to say the least.
Coming up next will be my first experience with scanning film into Lightroom Four. People talk about how big the 50MB files from the D800 are, but my film scans are typically double that. Even Lightroom Three was a little hesitant with those files, so this is going to be interesting.
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