If you are looking for a relatively inexpensive holiday gift for a photographer who uses Adobe Lightroom, LrSaver might be it. It’s a simple program which does one thing – create a screensaver based on your Lightroom catalog.
There are two features I like about LrSaver:
- You can use smart collections, which are based on any combination of metadata, to pick the images for your screensaver.
- LrSaver utilizes your Lightroom cache, not your actual images, for the screen saver. If you have your images on an external drive, you can still use LrSaver even if that drive is not connected.
Availability for Windows and Mac
Price: $9.99 at LrSaver.com
Lexar joined forces with Adobe to provide special discounts on Photoshop Elements 8, Premiere Elements 8 and Photoshop Lightroom 2. All Lexar Professional CF memory cards will offer $100 off the purchase of Lightroom 2, and $30 off Photoshop / Premiere Elements 8.
I’ve always been a fan of Lexar Compact Flash cards and at least the $100 offer for Lightroom 2 (currently around $250 at Amazon
) is generous. As always, I’d check out Adobe’s upgrade eligibility first, but this promo would currently be the avenue I would take, if I wanted to get a full license of Lightroom.
The new offerings and promotions from Lexar and Adobe will begin in November.
According to John Nack at Adobe, Infotrends recently surveyed 1,026 professional photographers in North America and found that more than four times more photographers use Lightroom to process RAW images than Aperture. Even on the Mac, Lightroom users outnumbered Aperture users by a factor of almost 2:1.
Why is Lightroom so much more popular than Aperture? I don’t know for sure, but I see four reasons:
- Many photographers already use Photoshop. Photographers might have given the initial nod to Lightroom simply due to familiarity with Photoshop and the Adobe brand.
- At its heart, Apple is a hardware company. While it has had a pretty good track record with its pro applications, Apple might be perceived as more likely to abandon them than Adobe, given that Adobe is purely a software company. Of course, Apple has deeper pockets than Adobe, but software is playing a second fiddle there. Maybe even a third fiddle these days given the success of the iPhone.
- Adobe is the custodian of many de-facto public domain photo formats, including TIFF and DNG. There is simply trust in Adobe to keep continuing this role and thus keep continuing to be focused laser-sharp on the photography market.
- Adobe has many existing relationships with camera manufacturers, thus they are able to provide support for new camera models very quickly. Of course, a number of the camera manufacturers are afraid of Adobe’s market power, but then, so are they of Apple’s, let alone Apple’s track record of not really caring that much about its ecosystem.
Personally, I’m not a professional photographer, but there were two more reasons why I ended up in the Lightroom camp: I got my Lightroom 1.0 license for free as part of Adobe’s acquisition of Pixmantec, the developer of Raw Shooter Pro, which I used before. Plus, I keep continuing to travel with a Windows laptop, thus I need Lightroom on both the PC and the Mac. And that rules out Aperture.
Why do you use Lightroom or Aperture?
Regardless whether you already own a copy of Lightroom, a beta of version 3 of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is now available. As always, it can be downloaded from 
