I'm not a complete Lr grouch... =)

Question

As I promissed I went and installed my courtesy copy of Lr v1.0 (thanks again Adobe, that was a classy thing to do!) and have gone through as many tutorials and videos as I can to learn all I could before putting it into my 'production' workflow. Again, I'm an amateur but I take about 6-8k clicks a year, mostly at 'events' related to my family but also just simply trying to learn more about photography and branching out artistically as I can. The only person I need to satisfy is myself, and my goal is to take both satisfying snaps and also expand creatively. Not easy for a colorblind engineer. =)
The RSP 'way' is still deeply ingrained in me, but for the most part the improvements between the last beta and Lr 1.0 have been enough to convince me to get on the bandwagon and give up RSP completely.
First, the bad:
Speed still has a ways to go. While I cringe at the slowness of the Lr UI sometimes, it certainly isnt as frustrating as the Beta was, and while I have no NEED for the database driven back end, for the most part it has stayed out of my way. I'm adding basic tag information but not overdoing it, as simple folder and chronological views are all I need to find any picture I want.
I still dislike the Crop tool but am getting used to it, begrudgingly. I understand many people love it but I wish it were toggleable back permanently to the way I want to work. I liken this to 'Invert Y' feature for FPS games. If, like me, you play Quake looking up or down the way a pilot would, being forced to invert this basic function would be unthinkable, and every FPS on the market allows those who wish to use either scheme to make a configuration choice once and get on with life.
Final output and renaming is still painful to me. I want to rename every one of my selects something unique. The tool to batch rename files works great, but if I want to identify my final output, say for my Flickr stream, this does not seem to work well for me. What I'd ideally like is to select the ones I want to output and then have the program go through them one by one with a window asking me what I want to name each individual one. Perhaps this is possible now and I missed it.
The Good:
The absolute level of control within the actual raw conversion is staggering. Especially in Black and White and especially the TaT. Here's but one example: I have a favorite picture of my niece that was shot horribly overblown. I 'rescued' it RSP, choosing to creatively live with blown out details, making something I actually liked despite the terrible technical no-nos.
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/73/178696020_fe7b7c0285_b.jpg
Using the tools in RSP, I have created a new vision that completely does away with those blown out areas and which I absolutely adore.
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/174/413088911_be54dd2355_b.jpg
And I did it in about 10 minutes with a minimum of fuss and while still being a relative noob to the program.
The Clone and Heal tools are simply magic. Yeah, "Dust" my butt =)
The Red Eye tool is very good with actual red eyes. Would like to see support for light grey mirror eyes as well. As I noted in another thread my Costco terminal does a fair job with this phenomenon, hope Lr can sometime in the future too.
The noise reduction is great for my purposes. It works miles better than I ever had RSP do. Sharpening is similarly good, I wish it were more detailed but still quick and easy and works.
The 'Versions' feature works great. Still getting up to speed on it but it's even more usable than the way I handled similar needs in RSP.
The never uses:
I never ever use Web output or the print modules. Every one of my pics will go to Flickr and/or Costco for output.
That's it for now. More as I play and explore this tool.
Sam

Answer 1

gwegner,
A few thoughts on "I shoot nef and nx renders them as jpg just like the camera does".
I personally find it hard to see the photographic virtue in that, which is not to say that it isn't valuable to you. I suspect that is because we have different perspectives on color and using jpegs out of the camera as standards.
I shoot professionally with three camera brands at this time, Nikon D2X, 200, D80, Sony R1, Olympus 880 and have shot digital with three other camera brands and types since the inception of digital and with numerous brands and types of film cameras for 40 years-so I do a lot of scanning of transparencies as well--it is my profession.
All these cameras give a different color 'look' and image quality jpegs initially out of the camera. I guess if I had to choose which looked the best, I'd put Olympus on top and Nikon on the bottom--but, in fact, I find none of them even close to what I can do to give them a 'look' in post processing RAW.
Color characteristics and the jpegs out of the camera 'look' is a far more complex issue than you make it out to be, at least for many of us. And in many cases that is definitely not a highly sought after quality--that is why Nikon NX and LR and dozens of other apps go far beyond replicating in camera jpeg algos exactly or just closely.
Whether--with any camera--that is the preferred way to work depends on what type of shooting you do and what you are using the shots for.
Photojounalists have different criteria than wedding shooters, than commercial, than Artist/Photographers,etc, etc.
For some types of photography 'right out of the camera jpeg color' makes sense--but by and large those shooters are not terribly particular about precise color values, dynamic range, high resolution, bit depth and scalability. For those of us who make a living with images that require these values, 95% of the images we shoot need post camera modifications of 'what the camera produced'(which by definition reflects the design criteria and 'look' that the engineers and marketing types at Nikon, Sony, Canon, etc, thought would sell, and that 'look' varies by brand considerably --with some slight lattitude built into the camera choices for the user.
RAW maximizes lattitude for rendering what one shot the image for in the first place, what one saw (subjectively) through the viewfinder, the photographic potential of the scene--the colors of which NO camera produces with absolute color fidelity--whether we appreciate what one camera produces over another is subjective. And for processing images to the 'color look' any given shooter wants, I would argue that LR is more effective as a tool than NX, a lot easier and faster to use becuause of its UI design and more precise control of image adjustments--in 95% of the cases.
We all should shoot in the manner that we find the most rewarding, of course, but many will find the notion of 'straight out of the camera' jpeg color, and Nikon NX as better than LR for post processing based on 'color out of the camera', just another differing personal preference.
I make a living on post processed imagery, so I prefer tools that give me the greatest post processing lattitude and workflow effectiveness. So, IF the choice came down to either LR or NX, LR would be an easy choice--although, I do use NX for control points in a few images with hard light contrast problems--simply faster than layers, etc, in PS.
Pardon the extended reply:)