mengwong - Photo of the Day: Fashion Baby

They've paid the kind of attention to keybindings that is usually reserved for first-person-shooter video games. For the first time in history we now have a pro photo processing workflow that moves as fast as you can press buttons on your keyboard. Editing pictures – selecting, comparing, deleting, cropping – used to be a tedious and painful process. Now it's as easy as shooting tribbles with a BFG.

Because I now enjoy editing photos as much as I enjoy taking them, LightRoom has made me a better photographer.

It's designed for the kind of photographer who comes back from a shoot with five hundred pictures and has half an hour to choose the best ten.

When I want to take a picture of something, I often shoot ten, twenty, thirty frames, getting warmer and warmer until I get the shot I was looking for.

Henri Cartier-Bresson, master of the decisive moment, would be appalled; he would take just one picture, and it would be the right picture.

But Henri Cartier-Bresson knew exactly how the world would look thirty milliseconds into the future. The rest of us have to grovel through sequences of crap, crap, and more crap, until we find the rose among the thorns, the diamond in the rough, the needle in the haystack.

With Lightroom, I select the entire sequence, hit C, and use command-click to eliminate the pictures I don't want. When I'm down to the best one or two, I hit G to go back to the gallery grid; and I hit B to add the picks to my collection. If I want to take a look at a picture up close, I hit tilde to view it full-frame, or Z to zoom to pixel scale.

Note that all these keys are pressed with the left hand, because the right hand is busy with the mouse. Isn't that brilliant?

If you're Dvorak, you're out of luck. Sorry.