My earlier plan of a longer series of posts on the ins-and-outs of Lightroom was devoured by work, holiday stuff, etc. In this post, I’ll talk briefly about Navigator, collections, and the Slideshow portion of the workflow.
Navigator
This feature, available in the Library and Develop portions of the workflow lets you look at various areas of a selected photo. You can zoom in as far as an 11:1 ratio. It’s quite useful in Develop, since at least some of the edits you can make (red eye reduction, spot removal) are most successful when you get in really close. I haven’t used this feature a ton, but I certainly haven’t found anything like it in iPhoto.
Collections
Collections are the mechanism for organizing groups of photos in Lightroom. They appear to be equivalent to iPhoto albums. In Lightroom, photos have to be in a collection before they can be sorted. Unlike iPhoto, Lightroom allows you to sort photos both in the filmstrip and the grid view. The number of photos displayed per row in the grid view also adjusts automatically based on how large you make the application window (it’s a manual adjustment in iPhoto).
Slideshow
In this amount of time using Lightroom, I only have one complaint: when you play a slideshow directly from the software, it starts reverting to earlier slides after you’ve displayed around 50. At least, that was my experience when I used to help a friend present photos from his trips to various Seventh-day Adventist churches. I’m hoping it’s some sort of trialware restriction, because that would be a pretty major bug otherwise.
Slideshows export as PDFs, with one slide per page. There are five default templates, and the software lets you create your own. You can change slide backdrops, text overlays, and layouts in a number of interesting ways. If I get some time before the trial runs out, I’ll make some sample outputs available in a subsequent post.
In retrospect, I should have used the Preview app in slideshow mode to present the slides, since there weren’t transitions, music, or anything else requiring Lightroom to run it.
Import
If Lightroom is on when you connect a camera or memory card to your Mac, a dialog pops up that lets you decide how to import the pictures. It didn’t interfere with iPhoto when I used it.