The pictures will appear both from the homepage and on Alamy - this is the 'tech' area and will feature comments on taking a trip and producing both family snaps and (hopefully) some saleable shots.

Of the 841 photos taken, around half were taken as RAW Nikon .NEF files. All photos were imported from the camera into Adobe Lightroom with the only change made being that of naming. The shots were divided into three groups (separated by date) and named 'Venice', 'Tuscany' and 'Garda' followed by original filename. At the time of import, the photos were also copied to an external 400Gb drive and then written to DVD-R. The total data measured around 4.2Gb and so fitted conveniently on to one disc.

The first 'problem' was evidenced when Lightroom converted from NEF to preview - this is best illustrated by the rollover below:

The image above is Lightroom's attempt at RAW conversion, the rollover image is what Capture One LE from Phase One does!

= No contest! All NEF files were converted to JPEG in Capture One and re-imported so I now have the equivalent of 'NEF plus JPEG' for all those shot as RAW.

Perhaps it should be mentioned that the above examples are 'out of the box' conversions - i.e. not tweaked in any way, so it may well be possible to get Lightroom to do a great job* - (it's simply that with 400 pics to 'treat', who wants to go there?) ...

Update: * - it is and on buying good old Scott Kelby's book 'Scott Kelby's 7-Point System for Adobe Photoshop CS3', I started to use Lightroom right!

Of course life is never that simple, a lot of what Scott does in his book is in 'Bridge', so you don't need Lightroom to do it, but, for me it all came together - just watch out for when you 'open as smart object' in CS3 from Lightroom - cause then it falls apart again!

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