Lightoom Users

[Glenn NK]

For those that haven't upgraded to LR 4 from LR3, the following offers some good reason (to me at least) to do so:

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/te...htroom_4.shtml

I have noticed the difference when I've updated images in LR4 that were developed in LR3.

Glenn

[Scott Stephen]

Dangit, Glenn! You are going to force me to buy a new computer!

Mine is 4+ years old and I am running LR 3. I have heard LR 4 can run slow on older computers though, so I have purposely avoided upgrading. But that link kind of makes me want LR4. Maybe it will run fine?

Anyway, watch your inbox for a furious email from my wife.

[Simon Garrett]

Thanks for the link - very interesting.

I agree with what's desribed there. I find the new "PV2012" basic (tone) panel in LR4 is much improved, and means that now I rarely need to use curve adjustments. With a bit of practice, LR4 is much better at recovering detail in highlights, shadows or both without messing up the tone elsewhere.

[Macmahon]

Dangit, Glenn! You are going to force me to buy a new computer!

Mine is 4+ years old and I am running LR 3. I have heard LR 4 can run slow on older computers though, so I have purposely avoided upgrading. But that link kind of makes me want LR4. Maybe it will run fine?

Anyway, watch your inbox for a furious email from my wife.

My machine is a (relatively) ancient iMac and it runs LR 4.2 just fine. You wouldn't regret the upgrade. The detail PV21012 is able to extract from RAW files - especially from the highlight tones at the extreme right of the histogram - is unbelievable.

Tim

[Glenn NK]

Dangit, Glenn! You are going to force me to buy a new computer!

Mine is 4+ years old and I am running LR 3. I have heard LR 4 can run slow on older computers though, so I have purposely avoided upgrading. But that link kind of makes me want LR4. Maybe it will run fine?

Anyway, watch your inbox for a furious email from my wife.

Scott:

I'm not sure that LR4 is significantly different than LR3 in terms of CPU usage.

My personal experience:

I have a dual core AMD that is six years or so old - when I bought it, it was pretty well the fastest machine made. Over the years, it slowly bogged down.

Not being able to spend the time (I'm self-employed and my time is money), I took it to a computer shop where they formatted the C: drive and reinstalled XP. What a difference. I was running a music program that generates piano sound - before the tuneup, it barely kept up with the output required. Now it has power to spare. The same computer shop guy told me six years ago, that he re-formats his C: drive once a year and re-installs, otherwise it bogs down.

Glenn

[Sponge]

My machine is a (relatively) ancient iMac and it runs LR 4.2 just fine. You wouldn't regret the upgrade. The detail PV21012 is able to extract from RAW files - especially from the highlight tones at the extreme right of the histogram - is unbelievable.

Tim

Well, I hate to say it, but you're machine isn't ancient in any way when comparing with my current mac. The latest version of Lightroom that is compatible with my mac is 2.7

Everything was fine until I got my current camera (which isn't 'new' anymore by today's standards). Now everything has to be updated just so I can actually process files without having time to pull the hair out of my head

Back to the topic at hand, I've heard great things about LR 4 (and 4.2) so I'm looking forward to upgrading once I get my new Mac. There was an interesting thread on mu-43.com talking about this same topic: http://www.mu-43.com/f108/thinking-a...oftware-27893/

[Andrew1]

Glenn, by your note above I'm reading you are using XP as well. I searched out LR3 because I was told LR4 isn't compatible with XP. I managed to find a copy of LR3 in Ontario and should receive it this week. Tell me I didn't waste my money on an older more expensive software.

PS..OK, just checked with Adobe and found XP is not compatible with 4 so I've calmed down a bit. Who reconfigured your computer? The guys at DTI built mine and I routinely defrag my two internal drives with the XP accessories. My PC isn't slow as far as I know but before I load LR3 it might be nice to know how to check. Is it just noticing a problem on the PC or is there some timed processor test I can use?

[Clactonian]

I certainly found the upgrade worthwhile.

[Colin Southern]

The two best things you can do for performance is to use a solid-state drive to work the images (they're down to just a few hundred dollars for a 250GB model), and ensure that the PC has enough RAM (8GB minimum if you're running a 64 bit OS).

[Andrew1]

P.PS.. just found this http://whohasthefastestcomputer.com/flopsmeter/ for testing processors and mine did very well.

XP 32 bit only allows 4 GB of RAM to be plugged in and it only uses 3 of that. Seemed like a good thing to do at the time I guess. XP 64 was a short-run experiment that didn't go over well. I looked a bit at Windows 7 just for the purpose of speeding things up but I hate to give up XP and will probably stick with it until something major breaks and I'm forced to move. In the meantime I'll just keep things clean and working. I'm just starting to learn editing and only ever do one shot at a time so I don't think I'll have any problems.

[Scott Stephen]

Scott:

I'm not sure that LR4 is significantly different than LR3 in terms of CPU usage.

My personal experience:

I have a dual core AMD that is six years or so old - when I bought it, it was pretty well the fastest machine made. Over the years, it slowly bogged down.

Not being able to spend the time (I'm self-employed and my time is money), I took it to a computer shop where they formatted the C: drive and reinstalled XP. What a difference. I was running a music program that generates piano sound - before the tuneup, it barely kept up with the output required. Now it has power to spare. The same computer shop guy told me six years ago, that he re-formats his C: drive once a year and re-installs, otherwise it bogs down.

Glenn

I also have a dual-core, and actually my original video card died, and I replaced it with a recent NVIDIA card. And at the same time I (sort of un-intentionally) upgraded to Windows 8 Ultimate. Long story. But anyway, it sped up my computer incredibly.
Hmmmmmm.

[Scott Stephen]

My machine is a (relatively) ancient iMac and it runs LR 4.2 just fine. You wouldn't regret the upgrade. The detail PV21012 is able to extract from RAW files - especially from the highlight tones at the extreme right of the histogram - is unbelievable.

Tim

I really love Lightroom. My goal is to never have to go into PS Elements if I can avoid it.

[davidedric]

I really love Lightroom. My goal is to never have to go into PS Elements if I can avoid it.

+1

[Glenn NK]

Glenn, by your note above I'm reading you are using XP as well. I searched out LR3 because I was told LR4 isn't compatible with XP. I managed to find a copy of LR3 in Ontario and should receive it this week. Tell me I didn't waste my money on an older more expensive software.

PS..OK, just checked with Adobe and found XP is not compatible with 4 so I've calmed down a bit. Who reconfigured your computer? The guys at DTI built mine and I routinely defrag my two internal drives with the XP accessories. My PC isn't slow as far as I know but before I load LR3 it might be nice to know how to check. Is it just noticing a problem on the PC or is there some timed processor test I can use?

The biggest problem (as pointed out by Patrick) is when one adds another camera. My 30D files were manageable, but the 5DII files are so much larger. Imagine what happens to the users of the new Nikon 800 series.

Actually my dual core XP machine is no longer being used for photography, so I did not know that LR4 would not work with XP.

The point I was making was that there is a huge difference in performance between a freshly configured machine and one that is six years old where the registry is full of junk. And this is one of the differences between MS and Mac machines afaik.

Sorry if I misled you on the OS. I should have also stated that I have three desk top computers, one for business, one for music (dual core XP Home), and one for photography (quad core 64 bit Win 7).

Glenn

[HMW12]

How does the noise reduction compare between LR 3 and 4? I am debating between upgrading LR or buying a noise reduction program.

[Simon Garrett]

How does the noise reduction compare between LR 3 and 4? I am debating between upgrading LR or buying a noise reduction program.

I've not noticed any huge difference. There was a big improvement between LR2 and LR3, but I'm not aware of a major enhancement to noise reduction from LR3 to LR4. One change in the way noise reduction is shown in the rendered images: noise reduction was not always shown in Develop Module in LR3 except at 1:1; now it's shown at normal view as well.

The main enhancement in LR4 is the basic panel (for tone mapping). For me, the upgrade is worth it for that alone. Huge improvement in tone control and recovery of highlights and shadows. It was good before (better IHMO than Nikon Capture NX2 - the other software I use for raw conversion) but now it's terrific.

[Kdfrank]

How does the noise reduction compare between LR 3 and 4? I am debating between upgrading LR or buying a noise reduction program.

Hi Helen, I've notice in LR4 vs LR3 all aspects of the develop module have improved in 4. In particular clarity and noise reduction. If you decide to upgrade you will immediately notice that they have given these adjustments much more "volume". Let's say in LR3 to get the desired clarity, you would move the slider fully to the right. In LR4 the same adjustment level can be accomplished by moving the slider much less. Lastly I've read that the algorithms for noise reduction in LR4 have been greatly improved as well. Hope this helps.

[HMW12]

Thanks Guys. Think I'll give it a try

[Glenn NK]

An update to my first post; I think the link demonstrates the value of LR4 over LR3 (I have three of Martin Evening's books on Lightroom, and found them very useful, particularly in learning the "whys" of adjustments, not just the "hows").

http://www.dpreview.com/articles/120...om-4-and-acr-7

He starts each example developing the images in LR3, then shows the improvements using LR4.

His last sentence is intriguing, "where I once used Photomatix or Merge to HDR Pro to blend exposure bracketed images together, I am finding that using just a single median exposure . . . gets similar if not better results".

Admittedly I have never used HDR, etc., however I often wonder when viewing others' HDR images if I could have achieved the same result with PV2012.

Glenn