Now that I've been using Lightroom (LR) for a while, I am glad that's what I ended up with. Aperture 2 was nice and a huge improvement over what I was using before, but if Aperture blew me away, Lightroom has dropped a nuke on my old workflow. In a good way, that is.
For microstock, I don't like to spend too much time post-processing each image. On the other hand, I don't want to upload photos that are below my standards. LR has been a big help, since I can now do almost everything there. In fact, some of my most recent additions to my iStockphoto portfolio were never opened in anything but Lightroom. The same goes for recent snapshots taken with my point and shoot, shot in jpg and edited in LR, before being uploaded to Flickr. I never imagined this, but LR has quickly become my most important post-processing tool.
One thing I have noticed, however, is that it seems to be easier to end up with noise in the final image, when I do my tweaking exclusively in LR (when working with RAW files). It has me zooming in and out constantly, keeping an eye on the darker parts and color gradients within the photo I am working on. Because that's where the noise appears first.
My attention to noise is based on my view on photos, as shaped by my time inspecting other people's work for iStock. For art, client work and personal projects, a bit of noise is not terribly important, but for stock, images have to be as clean as possible. Using noise removal software is out of the question for me, because I dislike the way photos look that have been subjected to these. So, I am forced to walk the line. But it also keeps me on my toes, so I'm not really complaining.
LR is more than just an editing tool, of course. Using it to actually organize my photos is still a little new to me, but I started importing my most recent (a year's worth or so) photo shoots as folders. Going through these one at a time, I picked out images that were good enough to get uploaded to iStock, but hadn't been for one reason or another. For the most part, I simply forget about these unpolished jewels, when I have a new shoot to focus on. By going over all these photos from my archive, I was able to make a collection inside LR, of shots that were stock-worthy. Over 100 photos currently reside in this collection, and these are images I might otherwise have forgotten about forever. So, for a first attempt at organizing through LR, I am quite happy.
Compared to Aperture, LR is much, much faster on my Mac. I wasn't bothered by the time it took Aperture to update and load, but now that I've experienced Lightroom, I don't see myself ever going back. I do like the how Aperture is integrated into the rest of OS X, but with the many wonderful plugins for LR, that evens out in the end.
Rasmus Rasmussen is on loan from iStockphoto, where he is part of the image inspection team.
