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| Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 | |||||||||||||||
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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. Quickly batch process, convert, and apply metadata to your photos on import. Easily make selections with multiple viewing and comparison options. Adjust and enhance color, exposure, and tonal curves nondestructively on more than 190 camera raw file formats, as well as JPEG, TIFF, and PSD files. Every change you make to an image is automatically tracked, so you can return to any state with a single click. With Lightroom 2, you spend less time in front of the computer and more time behind the lens.
Work with a tool focused on photographers' needs Accelerate your workflow Use it your way Who's It For?Professional photographers Advanced amateur photographers Educators The top reasons to buy Adobe Photoshop LightroomEnhance specific areas of a photo Quickly find any photo Automatically import and process your way Native 64-bit architecture Work smoothly with Adobe Photoshop software (sold separately) Multiple monitor support Be productive quickly Edit nondestructively Easily show off your photos online |
- Enhance specific areas of a photo, or precisely adjust overall color, exposure, and tonal range nondestructively
- Automatically import, rename, and sort your entire shoot; find your photos quickly with powerful yet flexible sorting, selecting, and organizational tools
- Present your work in dynamic slide shows, interactive web galleries, and a variety of flexible print templates; easily upload your photos to popular online photo-sharing sites
- Configure your workspace to manage image workflow and presentation more efficiently thanks to support for multiple monitors
- Every change you make to an image is automatically tracked, so you can return to any state with a single click
 Full Featured Workflow |
| Review Date: September 27, 2008 |
| Reviewer: Nikon131, Dallas, TX |
| I am not a professional but I have alot of photos I need to keep organized. I used iPhoto, but between it and Photoshop, there were some steps that just slowed down the process. Basically Lightroom is a combination of an organizational application with basic photo editing capabilities. It integrates well with Photoshop for more advanced editing. For my family snapshots though I rarely have to edit outside of Lightroom.
Navigating: ========== Basic key commands: G - Grid view, thumbnails of your photos E - Loupe, highlighted photo fullscreen D - Single photo in Develop mode C - Compare, see two photos side by side, nice when you are looking for the perfect shot. Command+Option+5 - Web module, I use this frequently to upload behind my site, via Lightroom's ftp upload option. Command [ or ] - rotates image CW and CCW Organization: ========== I am an organization obsessive, especially about my family photos. I have all of my photos on an external drive and LR is pointed to them. There are basically two types of "folders" in LR Folders and Collections. -Folders are just that, they refer to the physical folders/subfolders on your hard-drive and reflect the same structure in LR. If you have a folder named 2008>January>01 on your hard-drive, it will be so within LR. When you import into LR you can choose to 1. add photos without moving. 2. copy them to a new location. or 3. move them to a new location. -Collections are "virtual folders" within LR and these actually do not move the photo physically on your hard-drive. This is nice because you may have some photos you want to print, you just drag the thumbnails into a collection folder and you don't have to worry about it floating around somewhere on your computer. (when you actually delete a photo in LR it gives you the option of removing from Lightroom only or remove it from completely from your hard-drive) A new feature of LR 2 is the addition of smart collections. There are many options of smart collections, I use them to collect top rated photos. Here is how. You add a new smart collection which takes you into a little sub menu, where you can set how this folder collects photos. I have one called "top rated" which any photo from my folders rated 4 or 5 stars goes into this collection. So where you can drag and drop your favorite photos into collections you can also set these parameters and LR will do the organization for you. Love this feature. You can set smart folders my rating (0-5 stars) color label, dates... and a couple more options I haven't explored yet. As you can imagine there are countless different ways of making these... -Importing I basically plug my memory card into my computer and LR asks if I want to import. I have it set to create a physical folder on my hard-drive and import there. So my photos are organized on import. At this time there are options of renaming the whole set of photos with a custom name for example "las vegas 2008 vacation_etc......jpg" Editing: ========== This is basically the photoshop part of Lightroom, you have basic editing tools in the Loupe (E) but you need to go to Develop Mode/Module (D) for more advanced editing. You basically have control of color in LR, for example, white balance, hue, temperature, tint, brightness, saturation, curve...etc There is also allowances for Lens correction, noise reduction, sharpening, etc. You can do cropping in develop mode as well, which is very simple. A couple of new tools in LR 2.0, I have only started to play around with are Spot Removal and Adjustment Brush. Spot removal tool comes up like the stamp tool in photoshop, where if you have a spot of dust or a pixel you want to get rid of. This is a two step tool, where you first choose the spot you want to remove, (say a dark spot on someone's cheek) next you choose the area of the photo you want to replace the spot with (a clean area of the person's cheek) and voila the spot is gone. The adjustment brush is nice to have because you can overexpose, underexpose, adjust the contrast, brightness, saturation with a brush tool. This is something I didn't expect out of LR so I will definitely be exploring this tool. You can also edit in Photoshop pretty seamlessly out of LR. You can edit the original (100.jpg will be the one you will be editing in PS) and see the effects back in LR. Edit a copy in PS (100-edit.jpg will be created in your hard-drive and see it next to the original in LR. Also Edit in PS with LR adjustments, any edits in LR will be exported out into PS. One thing to keep in mind is that any edit done in LR are NOT HARD EDITS. Meaning, you do not affect the original image until you export that image out of LR. The edits are stored in LR until you do an export out into PS or into a folder on your desktop. Until then all photos can be restored back to their original state. -Presets: This is a fun part of LR. Lightroom comes already with some basic presets, which instead of remembering all the steps you took to edit one photo, you can save these steps into "presets". So in Develop mode you adjust the, hue, curve, temperature, detail, saturation..etc. of a photo, and you can save it as a preset, call it "preset outdoor" or something and then you can apply this preset to one or dozens of photos at once. Voila. There are lots of free presets already out there. (do a google search. the flickr lightroom group is a good source for learning) You can also cut and paste the edits of a particular photo and paste in onto a group of photos as well. Web Module: ========== This is also fun too. Basically you enter in your web ftp info into LR and tell it to point to a subfolder on your site. (www.website.com/gallery1) and this is where you upload the galleries too. LR comes with a few prepackaged galleries and flash galleries, you select your photos, choose the web template, edit the template (background color, type etc. and upload. and it's really that simple you have uploaded a gallery behind your site. Obviously you need to learn the basics, but before I had to upload with a ftp client, create the html etc. All in all, Lightroom really is a fantastic tool. I am still learning alot about it. And I know there are people who prefer Aperture and I will try it out to compare, but LR just felt right for me. Try out the 30 day free trial, test out as much as you can, It is not a cheap program but if you are as excited about this stuff it really is a great tool. Cheers. |
| Weird, Wild and Wonderful |
| Review Date: October 15, 2008 |
| Reviewer: Alexandra Bailee, Tucson, AZ |
| 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. |
| Well-designed versatile productivity tool for digital photographers |
| Review Date: September 14, 2008 |
| Reviewer: Rudy, Columbia, SC USA |
| Version 2 of 'Adobe Photoshop Lightroom' (LR2) is a worthwhile expansion of last year's successful introduction -- in particular, the welcome capability of enhancing selected regional portions of an image (as against the prior more restrictive global tweaks); a Finder bar that consolidates previously separate searches for dates, keywords and metadata (eg: capture date, camera make, location, etc) into one accessible central location; capacity for huge files (up to 512 MB); as well as dual-monitor support. The option for 64-bit execution in both Mac and Vista will further speed processing (but nowhere near the doubling you'd anticipate) for users having more than 4MB RAM memory.
LR2 is a combination photo cataloging and processing application geared to high-quality high-volume workflow in the wide-gamut photoRGB color space -- the platform-neutral CD installs either the Win or Mac version with minimal hassle; whether Win or Mac, the LR2 screen has a virtually identical look and feel. If you just want to spruce up family and travel snapshots, LR2 isn't for you; PSE6 autofix would be all you'd need and want -- saving time, space and yet another steep learning curve. If, on the other hand, you want the very best you can squeeze out of your digital camera, and don't mind investing a bit more time and effort, then LR2 comes as close as you can to high-volume production. If you use the RAW ('digital negative') capability of a DSLR, nothing else beats LR2 which 'develops' the RAW file as it imports the file into the catalog, and retains its 12- or 14-bit per color channel precision throughout ... without ever altering the original 'negative'. This is a far faster process than either Photoshop or PSE6 can deliver. In fact, LR2 has pretty much become the standard for those professional photographers who favor RAW capture. This feature will become all the more meaningful as camera development relentlessly moves towards 16-bit pixels on a full-frame sensor (recall LR2's 512 MP capacity!). While the great majority of your photos will be print-ready after LR2 'development' a few images might still need some targeted touchups from a dedicated application. Adobe would dearly love for you to use their flagship Photoshop cash cow. But, for most of us using photo inkjet printers, Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 (either Win or Mac) should prove more than adequate, a heck of a lot cheaper, and far easier to use. Conversely, if your photography demands heavy-duty professional CMYK press printing, then Photoshop (or similar) still is the big gorilla. Otherwise: healing, cloning, retouching and even adjustment layering are much the same in PSE6 as in Photoshop; because LR2 has already squeezed out most of the benefits of 16-bit color processing, the PSE6 8-bit/channel RGB limitation is no great handicap. |
| All you need for 95% of your editing |
| Review Date: October 29, 2008 |
| Reviewer: SATX Red, San Antonio, TX United States |
| 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. |
| The only image tool you will need |
| Review Date: December 1, 2008 |
| Reviewer: Linda Armstrong, Grand Junction, Colorado USA |
| I tried the previous version of Lightroom, but couldn't see much of an advantage over the free cataloging program that came with my Nikon cameras, so I uninstalled it.
This version is a different animal. I don't know whether to call it an image cataloging program with powerful image editor or an amazing image processing program with an intuitive cataloging feature. Its library catalogs images across multiple drives with an enchantingly user-friendly interface. The enchanced previews allow you to sort the sharp from the not-quite-so-sharp at a glance. Keywording for a shoot can be accomplished in minutes thanks to the spray formatting feature. Enter or choose a group of words once, then apply them to multiple shots. The program recognizes multiple image formats, including 180 versions of RAW, and you can covert them with ease. The Develop mode is magical. You can adjust exposure, white balance, healing (for those pesky dust spots)and everything else Raw for Photoshop can do, plus gradients and a brush tool that applies adjustments to certain parts of the image. In fact, most users will not even need Photoshop. The Print and Web output features are amazing. You can easily put together picture packages for friends, or clients, or create a fantastic Web gallery with eye-catching templates. The sharpening tool for output has been improved. You will love it. In short, this is my new toy and I can't stop playing with it! When I finish cataloging my slides, prints, and digitals, I will finally have 25 years worth of pictures under control. Thank you, Adobe engineers!!! I would kiss your feet... nah Terrific product. |
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