Adobe Lightroom is very popular, but many photographers don’t realize they can get most of its functionality (and some speed and workflow benefits) by using Adobe Bridge and Adobe Camera Raw (ACR).Lightroom has been somewhat deprecated to a “classic” designation and has been replaced with Lightroom CC. This leads many to fear for its futureThe idea of the “catalog” is Lightroom’s greatest feature. DAM: Digital Asset Management. But it’s limited in Lightroom. It can’t be placed on a network drive. It gets slow with lots of photos (120,904 for example):

Before we get into Photoshop, let’s talk about some other software, not made by Adobe, that can be useful.What do you guys use?Photomatix

Topaz

Google Nik

Lightroom Mobile

Synology Photo Station

Look Presets

VSCO

Greater than Gatsby

DarkTable (An Open-Source Lightroom)

Works with 10k photos, not so well with 50k photos. Sounds like LR.DigiKam (An Open-Source DAM)There is a problem with going back and forth between Darktable and DigiKam, and that is that Darktable reads the DigiKam sidecar file only once, when you import the image into Darktable. That means any changes you make to the image in either program, after import, won’t be picked up by the other.

Previous Topic

Back to Lesson

Next Topic