Well actually more like week 8- because I did what I tell others not to do! I decided to use my camera phone more and to use Lightroom mobile.
What went Right ?
The phone did a brilliant job for about 90% of my photography. It was there when I needed it, it was ready more or less instantly, and the results were indistinguishable from those on my Sony camera. To all intents and purposes the phone was invisible in public, so candid street photography was a doddle.
I used RAW on the phone to give myself some processing wriggle room. A word of warning, if you don’t use RAW, then further processing of the jpeg image will be limited as the camera will have already sharpened it, adjusted colours and added texture. So whatever you add is likely to end up with odd banding, white lines round hills and blocky colour.
Lightroom Mobile (LM) made it a dream to review and delete images on the move. I can see that it would be possible to do virtually all your post processing as you went along. However, I was on holiday, so it didn’t all get done. LM made it very easy to use phone apps such as Photoshop Express to produce collages and to otherwise arrange the images for Facebook and other social media. It also meant that, without having to insert my camera’s SD card into a reader at home, the images miraculously (if slowly) appeared on my desktop at home. Magic!
What was a Challenge ?
What I hadn’t factored in to my workflow was the useful, but very annoying, constant uploading of images to the cloud. Especially as my phone sent the images to icloud and LM sent them to Adobe cloud. At first I didn’t notice because I was processing images more or less immediately having taken them. They had not been uploaded so everything worked very fast. But then I missed a day or two!
Now everything had been uploaded and before it could be processed had to be downloaded again. This could take 5 seconds or 15 minutes per image, it just depended on the internet speed. I worked around it by turning off my internet until I had done basic deleting etc, but it was very irritating. I think I have a work-around but I’ll have to experiment before passing the tip on.
Then, when I got home, the whole saga repeated because both the icloud images and those from Adobe had to be downloaded before I could file them on my desktop. Nevertheless, on balance, I think that I have ended up with fewer and better images more quickly than I would have done if I had waited until I got home to do sorting and processing.
Lightroom Mobile
It became very clear as my trip progressed that, as a stand-alone app, LM worked very smoothly - especially when it had access to the cloud to help it make selections and to make more general adjustments. The AI aspect of the program is remote so you do need a good internet connection to use all the bells and whistles. Gone are the days of parking outside MacDonalds and piggybacking on their signal!
Next time
Transfering images from Lightroom Classic to Lightroom Mobile. Using Lightroom Mobile to find your images on your desktop computer.
