Tea Leaves

Earlier this week, I tried the Beta of the new tool from Adobe called Lightroom. The lesson I learned was: never try new tools.

On the surface, the beta appeared to work pretty well. Import was reasonably fast, and the application seemed to support my workflow well. It takes a bit more time to bring your photos in, but it keeps a preview image around in its library so that the library will stay usable as a meta-database even if the pictures themselves go offline. This allows you to keep the library on your laptop (say) and archive the pictures to other larger external drives or DVD. Perfect.

Then I tried to run Photoshop. Crash.

I quit Lightroom. Tried to run Photoshop again. Crash. Reboot. Crash.

I decided that I really should have tried Photoshop CS2 all those months ago for the new and shinier ACR 3. Install CS2. Crash.

I finally ended up rolling my disk completely back to an image of it that I made a couple of weeks ago. Then Photoshop CS2 launched fine. Then I hit round two of my torture.

I had hacked up a cool piece of Javascript in Photoshop CS to do my manual thumbnail generation. CS2 completely destroyed the operation of this script by making the file browser into a separate application called Bridge. This is painful because Camera Raw actually works much more nicely in Bridge than it did in the old file browser. It even lets me batch convert NEF files. But, now I have to go back to my old batch actions for JPEG files, which is clunky.

I almost got my old script working. But something about the interface between Bridge and Photoshop is not right on my machine. Whenever I run the script Photoshop crashes on quit. In fact, when I run the script that I based my work on (Image Processor), the same thing happens.

I wonder if rolling my disk back again would fix that.

Lesson learned: never change tools. Life is pain.