Raw capture straight from the camera
Our Lightroom 3 course is in full swing at Light. People are often surprised we offer a five day LR course and remark "What could you possibly talk about for five days?"
Lightroom is such a powerful program it will make your workflow as effective and efficient as possible, but only if you use all of the tools, tips, tricks, and techniques. To get a full understanding of the digital workflow and how each LR module, feature, and function applies takes some time. We have found five days is the perfect amount to go from total beginner to complete master. Interestingly, the same often applies to folks who have been using LR for years.
I have always thought much of Lightroom's power is in the Library Module. Most of the photographers we meet have some inefficiency when it comes to the first three stages of the digital workflow, Import, Edit, and Organize. This is where a strong understanding of digital asset management and Library functions come together to save the day. I find it this aspect so important I normally spend two full days with the Library Module ensuring everyone has a supreme grasp of its power. Only after the required legwork can we get to the fun and sexy stuff in the Develop Module.
Man cannot live in the lab alone so we will be out shooting tomorrow morning and for the rest of the week to build some source material and hone our workflow.
We did get to experience a fun little bug in Lightroom today though. Always interesting when the big demos do not go as advertised. Not sure whether this is new in 3.4.1 or was in 3.4 but will do a bit more troubleshooting tomorrow. Fortunately, the bug is a very limited scope issue. I do a demo Import of several files and rename the files in the process. The files I use have a combination of upper and lower case file extensions. If you happen to have "Leave as Is" selected in file extension on the import dialog-File Renaming tab, LR will not rename files with an upper case extension. This only seems to occur when the import source contains files with both upper and lower case extensions. So probably only applies to me in a few demos.
Fiat Lux!