I finally got around to installing Adobe Lightroom 2.3 last Monday after Dax hooked me up over the weekend, something I’ve been meaning to do for a while… I’m talking years, not months. Practically everyone I know who shoots professionally uses Lightroom, and the people I buy Photoshop presets from have been nudging me in that direction by including Lightroom presets in the action bundles. There are now so many tiny program icons at the bottom of my Mac desktop that they cover it from end to end, and I have a 17″ screen.

I’ve been wrestling with slices in Photoshop this week (I swear, I’ll be slicing in my sleep), but let it be known I’m not actually wielding a knife blade but a mouse. Hopefully I’ll have some time to get back to Lightroom soon and master it. Here are a couple of images using Lightroom settings:

A shot of Chris dela Fuente of Pixel 3 Photo Photography from last November, using a LR preset called “Cold Tone” with some further adjustments.

A shot of False Creek and Science World in Vancouver, with the planned Olympic Village under construction just off to the right of centre. I was testing Lightroom’s ability to correctly guess white balance, and I was pretty impressed with its estimation. I did a little bit of further tweaking of colour vibrance to bring out the signage in front of Science World, but the rest is all LR. I don’t know if I’ll be using Photoshop any less, especially since I rely on it for integration with Dreamweaver for web design. What I think Lightroom will do, however, is reduce my use of iPhoto for managing batches of photos. Probably not entirely, since iPhoto is quicker for some basic organizational functions (I use iPhoto Buddy to manage my libraries).

Enough geeky talk, it’s Friday. After a rather crappy start to the week, things are looking up again — in the form of a wedding photography deposit. Until a contract is signed and a deposit is made, there’s always a bit of doubt in the back of the mind that a client may decide to go with someone else.

Oh, and I caved and joined Twitter. I resisted for a long time and Twitter for other businesses, but I needed to start using it for myself. It boiled down to the fact that it’s one of the best ways for a self-employed person to be found in a virtual crowd. ‘gailatlarge’ was taken, so you can find me under ‘ImageLegacy‘, and I’ve got a little Twitter feed going on in the sidebar. Happy Friday!