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Digital Asset Management is going mainstream. And most people don’t even realise it. With the development of Lightroom to version 3 (currently in beta) and the recent release of Aperture 3, sophisticated stand-alone DAM tools are reaching photographers everywhere. They may not be perfect at all aspects of DAM, or suitable [...] In a way I suppose it’s partly jealousy. After all, Scott Kelby is the author of many international bestsellers, all of which focus on the art and craft of photography. I could be so lucky. Or clever. But I do have other, more valid reasons to think less of Scott’s latest book. And it’s this: he has SUCH influence and he’s peddling rubbish. With influence comes responsibility!
Lightroom is of course an application that covers a lot more than digital asset management, but if you use it, it does have a large role in that process, so it’s good to understand the basics behind DAM to get the most out of it. And it’s here that Kelby’s book falls over for me. It covers all aspects of Lightroom, and I’m quite happy with what I’ve read in the other sections, but the first section, the section on the Library, is what I’m struggling so much with. It is in there, understandably, that all “digital asset management” type functions occur.
Adobe – They placed nearly ALL of their focus on Lightroom 2 Beta. Sure, they plugged CS3 and a few other bits and pieces, but they seem obsessed with Lightroom. I am only just today evaluating the product for myself, but to me it sits awkwardly between and on top of other Adobe products. It’s not a full on cataloguing software like iView Media Pro (now Microsoft Expression v2, and more of that later), and neither does it have the browsing power and functionality of Bridge. It handles raw and dng files, and it does some local adjustments and non destructive editing, but in no way does it replace Photoshop. So what does it do? Well, I think the best explanation I got was from well known Photoshop author Mark Galer, who basically said that it was a work flow solution for some photographers, in some situations. To me it feels like it’s aimed at consumers as opposed professionals, but I’m still to really figure out how it works. What I do know however is that my test catalogue of some 3500 images (mostly jpgs and a few hundred raw files thrown in as well) fills up some 3.46GB of space. The images themselves only fill 8.45GB. Admittedly I have 1:1 previews built in to the catalogue, but it’s a whopping catalogue nonetheless. My old iView Media Pro catalogues covering over 10,000 images with full size previews were only 1GB! Go figure… I do like the design of Lightroom however, and I look forward to discovering exactly where it sits amongst the plethora of photographic software now on the market. All I can say however, is that Adobe are going real hard on this one, so I assume they see such a product as filling a very important niche or future direction. |
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I’m trying to plough through his latest book on Lightroom, the incredibly long-winded “
As I write, there are no doubt a lot of people getting drunk. It’s Sunday night, and the
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