Lightroom: John Burns March 9th 2012

John Burns came from Newport to set our Club on fire last night. Not literally you understand, but certainly he had us all listening avidly to his talk on Lightroom 3.5. I must confess to being a user and enthusiast for this piece of software but hadn’t realised some of the hidden depths of this programme.

Even though I thought I knew the software well, John knew it far more intimately. In the first half of the evening, he was in full flow when his electronic Apple threw a wobbly and ‘lost’ his Lightroom Catalogue.

Fortunately, at tea break, we had another fire-fighter in the audience who helped John regain total control of his errant machine. Lost but not destroyed and that was one of the key points of the software; images were never degraded or destroyed, merely that all your adjustments were stored neatly in a separate little pile of logs, sorry, digits.

And I thought Apple computers never played naughty tricks…

The facts came thick and fast, but, fair play John encouraged interaction with his audience, and he was not disappointed. Questions were answered quickly and eloquently; here was an expert user of some stature.

He told us a little of his other hobby: Brass Bands; both playing and conducting and of his website devoted to the subject that despatches millions, yes millions of pages of info in a year to people around the world.

We listened to his eloquent delivery almost until ‘chucking out’ time, such was the interest from the audience. I was sat behind the deputy chairman who, if I read his body language correctly, became a convert as the evening went on!

Time will tell.

As John repeatedly said, Lightroom in no way undermines what Photoshop does so well. It is to be thought of as a way of organising all ones images with its powerful database properties

And finally, as they say, John had a moment of heat when a certain lady in the audience asked if he would like to come home with her! The flames of love (for Lightroom) had leapt across from our speaker to the audience!

How ‘cool’ is that?

Mike Baker