I'll just note in passing that Capture One is an alternative to lightroom and is said to offer superior tethering support.
The Canon utility will save CR2 raw files. Lightroom will save DNG raw files. If I use the Canon utility, I will have to use Lightroom anyway to convert the raw files to TIFF or JPG, so why not cut out the middle man and just use lightroom to begin with? The EOS utility might offer some extra or different features, but I am not aware of any that are compelling at this point.
Lightroom tethering does support live view for some cameras, but not my older Canon cameras. My Canon 1D mark III and my 5D mark II both support live view with the EOS utility, but not with lightroom, which is unfortunate.
I'll note that if you are using a Sony camera, you do things differently. Lightroom does not directly support Sony tethering (allegedly due to a lack of cooperation from Sony), so you have to use the Sony "remote" utility along with a watched folder in lightroom. With a Canon or Nikon camera, you get built in support from lightroom.
I am currently using my Canon 1D mark III (which works just fine). In lightroom, I go to "File" then select "tethered capture" then "start".
The lightroom dialog to start tethering in confusing. First of all, the "session name" will be the name of the folder that gets the images. This goes hand in hand with the path you specify later in the dialog. In my case I make the session name "2022_my_shoot" and the path later to be "lightroom/2022", so the photos end up in "lightroom/2022/2022_my_shoot" which is how I like things to be.
I have no idea what "segment photos by shots" means. And at the bottom of the dialog is an equally confusing "Disable Auto Advance" checkbox. Scott Kelby explains both of these clearly:
What auto advance is, is that lightroom will change its "focus" to follow new images as they appear. This is probably what you/I/we want. Segmenting is an aid for someone doing a shoot of several things and avoids going all the way back into the tethering dialog to change the folder name. Take a look at Kelby's explanation.
A recommendation is to set the Develop Settings to "same as previous" so if you adjust the first image, subsequent images will inherit the same adjustments.
When you are all done you have to select all the images and export as TIFF. There doesn't seem to be a way to have lightroom do this on the fly.
Tom's Computer Info / [email protected]