Well, I finally finished processing images yesterday.

We've made our selection for printing (152, down from 1935 of mine and 270+ of Chris's) and soon I hope to get some on-line galleries up. Her initial comment was that she'd like to print all 530 shortlisted imnages!

Working through them again I kept seeing mistakes, some of which could be rectified by careful processing, while those cropped a little too tight couldn't be saved at all. Using Adobe Lightroom has made the processing quicker in some ways, but by providing more tools it has also encouraged more manipulation which has the effect of slowing things further. I've deliberately not worked on the 'best' images more than necessary because I just wanted them done good enough for 6X4 prints and low res web work.

I really appreciated the tools in lightroom that enabled identification and selection of specific images for printing and upload, and it's made the whole affair enormously easier than trying to process in one package, then shuffle copies the actual post-processed images around in order to ID selected images. Last time we ended up writing file numbers in notebooks (that got lost) and still managed to miss some pictures. It's so much less stressful when the images are stored in a single database along with all processing information.

The techie bit.

For those interested, this experience has really brought home to me how much better it is to process RAW data files than .jpeg images. With RAW output from the Sony and careful exposure it was almost always possible to retain data in clouds, flowing water etc (though not in chrome parts on cars) and pull detail from shadows. By comparison the .jpeg files from the Panasonic almost always had blown highlights and muddy shadows, and any kind of image recovery resulted in colour noise and detail blocking up. Noise reduction just made loss of detail worse. On top of that I was surprised at how much colour correction was necessary for the Panasonic. Files from the sony still needed correction, but it was *usually* a tiny amount, where the camera was being fooled by large areas of a single shade.

This very much reminds me of why I've abandoned using the old Samsung compact - image processing was always damage limitation and control for anything above websize.

Marc - you were asking about Lightroom on the MBA. Adobe have a free 30 day trial, and I'd definitely recommend giving it a go. Then wait & see if they have any 'very special' offers like they did last Christmas.