Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 | Weird, Wild and Wonderful

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 | All you need for 95% of your editing

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Adobe Photoshop Li...

	Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 Windows, Mac OS X Intel, Mac OS X Leopard \| Adobe, 2008 average customer review:based on 14 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 software is essential for today s digital photography workflow. Now you can quickly import, process, manage, and showcase your images from one shot to an entire shoot. With Lightroom 2, you spend less time in front of the computer and more time behind the lens.

Weird, Wild and Wonderful

This is the story of three bears. Papa Bear, AKA Photoshop, Mama Bear, AKA Lightroom, and Baby Bear, AKA Bridge. Papa Bear carries the weight and does the heavy lifting. Mama Bear organizes everything and gets lots of important work done behind the scenes. Baby Bear is smaller, but still important to the family. Together, the three bears are a powerful family, especially to the photographers who revere and adore them.

Okay, lets kick the bear metaphor to the curb and take a look at this marvelous thing we call Lightroom 2. Who needs it? You do, if you are an enthusiast amateur or professional photographer. You need it if you take hundreds of photos every week and you have thousands of photos in your archives. You need it if you shoot events--reunions, weddings, mitzvahs, company events--and you have to output hundreds of photos in a relatively short time. Lightroom is that part of your workflow.

The moment you pop the installation DVD into your computer, you'll want to start playing with your photos. Resist the temptation. Take a few minutes to personalize the interface by customizing the Identity Plate and Module picker. You can also set up the Panel End Marks and image background. (This is especially handy if you occasionally have clients looking over your shoulder.) Don't forget to set up the interface preferences to suit your style.

Lightroom is a collection of five specific modules: Library, Develop, Slideshow, Print and Web.

The process begins by importing photos into the Lightroom 2 Library. You'll recognize a process similar to bridge. You'll add keywords and import your photos. There are Grid and Loupe views. You can compare two photos or view multiple photos. In the greater scheme of things, you'll create catalogs of large collections of your photos.

One of the features which is often underutilized but wonderfully helpful is the rating system. You have the option to sort your photos by giving them a 0-5 star rating. You can also add more specific keywords to individual photos or specific groups of photos. Taking time early on an paying attention to these mundane labeling tasks pays off big time down the road. Weeks, months and years pass, but thanks to your diligent attention to keywords and ratings, you are able to pull up just the photos you want quickly and easily.

The Develop module is where you can get in there and play with your photos. Time for processing. Go wild and change the color temperature and tint, adjust the exposure, brightness and contrast. Make changes with the Recovery, Fill Light, Blacks, Clarity Vibrance, and Saturation sliders. If you're still not satisfied, you can call up the adjustment brush and lighten shadows by changing the exposure in a specific
area. If that's not enough, you can open up and use the Detail tool. Next, you have the Vignette tool to separate the background from the foreground.

Wait, there's more. You have a crop tool as well, and with a few keystrokes you can enlarge the virtual image and view it against a plain, black background.

The range of possibilities in the Develop module is stunning. You have to pinch yourself every-once-in-a-while and chant, "Lightroom is not a stand-alone product. It doesn't replace Photoshop." The line where Lightroom ends and Photoshop begins can get a little blurry.

Now that your image is the picture of perfection, you can head to the Print module. Here you'll find a nice selection of Lightroom templates for various printing options like 2-up Greeting Card, Contact Sheets, Triptych or Fine Art Mat to name a few.

So, what's new in this version of Lightroom? I mentioned the Adjustment Brush and the Post-Crop Vignette. Lightroom 2 also has improved speed, better and stronger integration with Photoshop, better printing, the keywording feature has more muscle, you can use multiple monitors and the Library, Slideshow, Web and Print modules are beefier and more useful. One particularly important area of improvement is in the Find, Filter and Sort features.

I don't want to give short shrift to the Slideshow, Web and Print modules. Like other modules in Lightroom 2, they are deliciously rich and full-featured. One of my personal favorites is the Slideshow feature. I use it frequently and enthusiastically. There are so many amazing ways to utilize your photos in slideshows.

Lightroom 2 is fantastically feature-rich. You'll probably buy it for Library module, but don't cheat yourself by not taking advantage of all the other Modules. Consider it your license to creatively liberate yourself. It can be your photo-fun place. Lightroom truly is a weird, wild and wonderful thing. Download a free, 30-day trial at www.adobe.com and give it a test drive.

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All you need for 95% of your editing

I started with Lightroom 1.0, survived its quirks and have now grown to love the more mature 2.0 version. Here are some of the features that make this program indispensable: Able to make fundamental edits, assign key words, and place the photos into an existing or newly created folder all on import; Can make all edits on one photo and then copy these edits to all or selected photos - the first time I corrected the white balance on a whole photo shoot with only a couple of clicks, the angels started singing (who hasn't forgotten to take the camera off the incandescent setting!); 95% of all corrections can be done without exporting to Photoshop.

Above is only the tip of the iceberg. Two features that must be mentioned: 1) Lightroom does NOT change your original photo - all changes are kept in a metadata file, so you don't have to make copies of your originals as they are untouched - no more making copies and keeping them in another folder as "originals" This allows you at any time to step back through your corrections or return to the original file to restart editing. 2) The program handles multiple file formats seamlessly. I can now shoot exclusively in the RAW file format for optimal editing capability without the old hassles of converting the RAW file for editing.

While documentation is pitiful, there are tons of excellent free video tutorials available - I use iTunes to find them and have watched dozens. Open one of these videos alongside your open copy of Lightroom and you will learn quickly as you practice the techniques.

Lightroom can be used simply for organizing your photos or complexly to manipulate to your heart's content. You will be richly rewarded for any time spent learning the more sophisticated features of this truly magnificent program.

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Lightroom 2

This is not a beginner's program. It is a very powerful photo processesor;however, you really have to know what you are doing. It is still a new product and there is very little support. For instance, I learned what collections are and folders, but I don't know what or how catalogs work. When I created a "smart collection" I have an error, and I have spent the past week trying to get the mystery solved. No one really knows about the program, and one of my friends said "Sorry, I can't help you. I am still trying to figure it out myself." That is exactly how I feel, and I am worried that I did it "wrong" and I will have to scrub everything and start again.
Juliana

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What it does well, it does really well.

After using Photoshop for years, Lightroom 2 is my tool of choice for most areas of photo editing. The slideshow is very accurate in tone, contrast and detail, much better than Bridge. I like the non-destructive element and being able to go back at any time and undo work done in previous sessions without having to create the memory hogging layers of Photoshop. The print module is the best I have ever used. I am viewing the images more accurately than ever, everything in my system is the same, Lightroom is the only change. The "clarity" tool is excellent in giving the image punch and I love the "zeroed" filter which as I understand it, presents a "raw" image and that's what it looks like to me. I do very little if any sharpening these days. However, when necessary this sharpening tool doesn't turn the grain into salt and pepper or negatively change the look of the grain. It is more like using the grain sharpener while using an enlarger in the darkroom without a digital fingerprint in other sharpening tools I have used.

The downsides, are for some reason even with a quad core 64 bit, 4 gig ram, 2-500g hard drives, images in Lightroom can take a very long time to load. I have found that cleaning windows seems to solve this problem and speed Lightroom up again. In addition, some of the images I work with, scans from medium format film (80 megapix) need to be shrunk closer to actual print size especiall when working on a body of images at the same time. Also the excellent brush tool can sometimes have a mind of its own and if drawing too quickly a stright line appears instead of the curvy line drawn. So far I've solved this problem by downloading the most recent Wacom software for the pen and tablet and drawing a bit more slowly.

In conclusion, with the few faults that I hope Adobe will patch sooner rather than later, I now use Lightroom 2 for most photo edit and print work with very little work in Photoshop CS2

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Great Workflow

Lightroom 2 is a great tool for digital photographers wanting an affordable product to process and catalog their digital images. It's designed for photographers, not graphic designers, who want to spend their time shooting; not behind a computer. The smooth workflow ensures rapid sorting, editing and exporting images, but not at the expense of some advanced editing features, should they be required. A great product all round.

reviews: page 1, 2, 3

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