» Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 Reviews

Customer Rating:
Summary: Speedy, Efficient, Great Editing
Comment: As an amateur photographer, Lightroom 2 was on my wish list for quick photo editing. Now that I have it and have used it, I am more than satisfied!

The library and sorting system are user-friendly and customizable. Not only can you import your photos and keep them in the same basic folders that are used on your hard drive, you can create your own collections. Lightroom has it set up that you can save photos in folders you create and name, as well as in "Smart Collections" which sort your photos automatically based on how you rate your photos (1-5 stars, which, by the way, is another great feature more users should utilize, allowing you to easily mark your favorites), recently edited photos, photos from the past month, photos without keywords, and colored red photos (something I'm still figuring out). For photographers who take dozens, if not hundreds of photos each week and need a quick and easy way to sort, Lightroom 2 makes this possible.

Another feature to the sorting and organizing is the keyword feature. Create your own, and based on how many times you use a certain keyword, or combination of keywords, Lightroom 2 automatically suggest keywords at the top of the list of all used keywords. What a convenient setting when tagging multiple photos from the same event!

The next feature you'll find and love in Lightroom 2 is the Develop feature, where you can choose from several preset edits (among which are aged edits, grayscale, sharpening for landscape). In the Develop setting, you can preview what the edit will do on the photo by scrolling the mouse over each preset title and watching the thumbnail photo transform (on the left side of screen). Also, the program saves the photo file in original form, as well as a history of all actions taken to modify the photo. Again, you can scroll over the history to see the changes in the thumbnail, allowing you to quickly find the change you like best, without having to go back through layers and layers as in Photoshop.
The Develop setting allows for quite a range of possible editing features, from basic white balance and sharpening and exposure, to tone curves, saturation, split toning, detail, vignettes, and camera calibration. While Lightroom 2 still doesn't allow for all the fine editing that can be accomplished with Photoshop, photographers will find that using the quick edits in Lightroom will save a great deal of time in Photoshop, and may even find that fewer photos need extra tweaking in Photoshop.
You will find a neat feature in the Develop mode, which is the adjustment brush. This feature allows for masking in selective ares, adjusting exposure, brightness, contrast, sharpening, and more, without changing your entire photo.

Next you'll find the slideshow mode, which allows for adding a stroke border, shadow, identity plate, and text overlays to a select group of photos for a slideshow. This is a mode that I personally don't use, as my work and interest is more in the organizing and editing.

For photographers who desire to print, the Print mode quickly allows you to create contact sheets and picture packages with multiple photos and multiple sizes on a sheet. The program automatically rearranges photos to maximize the number printed on a sheet. Great feature here!

Finally, the Web tab is a feature likely to be most used by those who want to create an easy way to put photos directly from Lightroom into their website. Here you can choose from several different templates which again automatically place the photos from your selected collections.

Lightroom 2 is a must-have for photographers wanting to spend less time at the computer running edits, tagging, and organizing. Some casual users may find that Lightroom 2 is more than needed for their purposes. My only negative comment, and why my review is 4 stars instead of 5, is that Adobe neglected to include a user manual in the packaging or on the disk. Users may want visit Adobe, search the web, and visit forums for in-depth help and tips to get the most of Lightroom 2.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: It does what Camera RAW anbd Bridge does but better
Comment: Where do I start.
This is a great package. I used to open all my photos in Camera Raw and catalog them using bridge. Adobe Light Room 2 has many more features and is non destructive. I shoot almost exclusively in RAW and then convert them to DNG. LR2 allows for spot correction, graduated touch-up, and some masking features. The only drawback that I can find is that if you are new to the Adobe tools it is a bit overwhelming. I use Kelby training and have gone through many of the videos which have helped me catchup quickly. For $20 per month (less if you are a NAAP member) you can view all of their training as much as you want. Back to LR2 - I am still finding new ways to do things but I think this is a great program. One feature I especially like is the presets. They give the user the ability to do some basic editing on all your photos.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: A worthy Upgrade
Comment: Well, to start with, I am a professional photographer and I have used version 1 of Lightroom for quite a while - pretty much since it came out. I really like Lightroom, and I recommend it to anyone, amateur or professional, who takes a lot of images. If you go on vacation somewhere wonderful and bring back 100 photos, Lightroom probably isn't for you, but if you routinely shoot a few hundred exposures or more on a weekend trip or a one day professional assignment, then you need it. It's that simple.

So, in this review, I am going to talk mostly about what's new. There's quite a lot. The two "inside the engine" things that got me excited are support for 64 bit operating systems and multiple monitors. The 64 bit thing just makes it faster if you have a 64 bit operating system. The two monitors let you see the grid view on the second screen while you work in loupe mode or develop on the other one.

Another new feature is an adjustment brush that is local, making it easier to dodge and burn when necessary, and, if you sell print packages, you will enjoy the new ability to arrange multiple photos on a page.

I couldn't really find much in the way of negatives to say, so I won't try. If you like Lightroom 1.1, you will love this version, and if you take a lot of photos and haven't tried Lightroom yet, what are you waiting for

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Zoom Zoom For Your Images
Comment: Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2
One of the main improvements and a darn good reason to upgrade to Lightroom 2.0 is that you can now do localized editing to RAW images. This brings Lightroom more in line with Photoshop but allows faster work than opening Photoshop, doing RAW conversions, going to work on one image at a time and then saving it. Note that Lightroom is not a replacement for Photoshop as it does not contain the many tools that Photoshop includes to allow you deeper, more sophisticated image editing. With Lightroom simple, quick adjustments to exposure, sharpness and color are a brushstroke away (via a handy widget). Once you make adjustments to your image a feature I really like is that you can scrub your image where the mask is located to make further small adjustments. This setting moves all the adjustments you made together, so if you adjusted brightness, saturation and clarity you can then scrub to increase or decrease all three together.

There is a nice gradient feature so you can make quick gradient adjustments to your image like the sky for example which will add a polarized or neutral density effect. I like using this feature for my landscape and cityscape photos.

A nice feature I found useful is the newer (and smarter) way to deal with metadata keywords. Lightroom 2.0 now makes suggestions and it can really speed up your tagging process. If you seem to pick "San Diego" for example after regularly picking "ocean" for a tag it will start to suggest San Diego any time pick you select ocean.

Lightroom likes lots of computer power like any image program and the more quality hardware you throw at it I am sure it will run faster for your edit processes. I am using it on a MacPro Early 2008. I did discover that you will need to disable 32 bit mode if you want to program to open in 64 bit (assuming your computer and operating system can handle that). I don't understand why Adobe didn't have the program automatically detect 64 bit computers but it is a simple setting in the Get Info area that you just uncheck.

Overall I think anyone that takes more then a few pictures and anyone that enjoys shooting with RAW will find this is a great program.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: A high end photofinisher and organizer--but not for the casual user
Comment: Adobe is a maker of some pretty high-end software. A lot of it is aimed at professionals and it is pretty clear that they usually create the gold standard when it comes to imaging software. Photoshop is that gold standard.

Lightroom is Adobe's photo organizer for the professional photographer. But it is not simply a sorting program. Lightroom combines five basic components: library function, an exceptional photo editor, a slideshow editor, a photo printing optimizer, and component that creates web galleries.

Installation the program is easy on the Macintosh. You simply load the CD, hit the icon, and follow the instructions. The program loads itself, performs quick update, and you're ready to go. In comparison to programs like Photoshop and Acrobat Professional, the installation is swift. This indicates to me that the program is either much less complicated and smaller in the aforementioned programs or that Adobe's software wizards have worked their magic on the installation process.

This program is very similar experience to other Adobe programs I have used in the past. Although Adobe always has an impressive range of powerful features built into the programs, these features are not always obvious to the first-time user and the interface is not completely intuitive. This phenomenon is even worse if you are inexperienced with Adobe's products. (In many programs, if you 'mouse' over a button, a balloon pops up and tells you what it does. This does not happen in Lightroom and is one of the deficiencies.)

I do use both Photoshop and Acrobat Professional but I must admit that was a long and hard learning curve for both these programs. The help menus are often of little help and you have to try to find outside sources of information. The Adobe website is often helpful as are many other sites that have popped up that help you navigate the tangled web of these programs. That being said, once you develop the skills they become second nature and you really have incredibly powerful tools at your fingertips. But getting there isn't half the fun and even figuring out simple things can drive you crazy.

Lightroom gives one a similar Adobe experience. Many features on the surface of the program are easy use and intuitive. For example, you simply point the program in the direction of the files containing relevant media and the program quickly loads the pictures into Lightroom's interface.

Lightroom's library feature is robust. It is nice to have tools that rotate photos directly on the photo itself. It is easy create keywords and folders to organize your photographs. The program handles huge amounts of photos on my iMac effortlessly. This may be the Intel core duo processor's doing or it could be the programming itself. That being said, when compared to iPhoto, Lightroom seems fast, light, and bouncy. In this mode, you can do simple photo editing tasks, but the real photo editing occurs in Lightroom's develop mode.

To activate the developing mode, you simply the press of 'develop' button. The are many things you can do in this mode. Some are quite obvious and others require a deeper knowledge of the program. Given poor documentation within the program, I had to go to Adobe's website and some ancillary sites in order to figure out some of the more interesting components program. It is a lot of fun to do localized burning and dodging and other corrections. There are even automated buttons that optimize photos incredibly well without the burden of manual retouching.

Photos can even be sent directly to Photoshop for further manipulation. However, 99% of what you need to advanced retouching and enhance your photographs is right there in Lightroom. Photoshop is only necessary if you want specific effects, complex layers, or if you want to combine images.

It should be mentioned, that the base image is always preserved. That means that your corrections are never permanent and you can always revert back to the original photo. There is also support for most raw photos. This is probably important for high-end photographers, but not much use for me.

The printing features are also robust. You can easily construct contact sheets with photos of different sizes. You can select the various sizes of photographs that you wish to produce, and Lightroom will print them easily on an 8 x 10 sheet of photo paper. For example, you can select three 4 x 6 photos, two 5 x 7 photos, and 16 wallet size photos and Adobe Lightroom figure out how these will fit on the least number of 8 x 10 sheets of photo paper.

I have not used the slideshow functions extensively, but a brief look shows you that it's easy to create an effective and professional slide show. Similarly, the web functions allow you to upload photographs for web galleries. You can even upload the photos to most photo sharing sites. I did not delve into these features extensively, but they are pretty straightforward.

The most apt comparison for most buyers would be to Photoshop Elements. Lightroom is once again meant for the more advanced photographer. Elements is more intuitive but a less capable editor and cannot edit raw images. Also, the photo organization aspect of Lightroom is far more advanced. However, if you are not a professional photographer it is hard to justify the price difference, even with Lightroom's flexibility. Even though Elements is more limited program, it probably has enough features for the amateur photographer or the shutterbug who just wants to make a few adjustments to some pictures.

I would also have to compare the program to Apple's iPhoto. I am not a big fan of iPhoto, but it actually does a great job of organizing your photos. If you have a Mac, you do not really need another program to do this. iPhoto's editing capabilities are far more limited, however. Lightroom has many other features that that are missing in iPhoto and the ones that the programs share in common are also more primitive in iPhoto. However, most casual users probably do not need all the bells and whistles of Lightroom. Apple also makes a program called Aperture. I am not familiar with Apple's high end editor, so I can't comment on it.

Which brings us to my favorite, simple, bargain-basement photo editing program: Picasa3. Unlike most Apple users, I like Picasa much better than iPhoto (this is considered heresy in the Apple world). I find it more intuitive and I also believe that the feature set is much broader. Once again, Picasa3 is a far more limited program than Lightroom. Lightroom has far more features, but for the average user Picasa's feature set may well be enough. So for simple organization and retouching of photos, Picasa may be the answer for the average Joe. Picasa is also free.

But remember, Lightroom 2 is a far more advanced program with capabilities well beyond Photoshop Elements, iPhoto, and Picasa3. However, it is hard for the casual user that to justify the $274 dollar cost of the more advanced software when the $76 Elements or (if you have an Apple computer) the free iPhoto and (for PC users) Picasa software does enough for most folks.

The robust feature set of Lightroom, is its main attraction. This is one slick program with a lot of capabilities. With a little research and a little reading on the web, the program becomes even more powerful. However, Lightroom is aimed at professional photographers and advanced amateurs, not at the guy who simply wants to snap a few pics and upload them to a site or make some quick prints.

The buyer should be warned, however, that as with most Adobe software you have to do some web research to find all the hidden gems and features of the program or buy one of the 'how to' books that cover the "hidden secrets" of Lightroom.

With Adobe, you can 'try before you buy.' It may make sense to see if this program fits your needs before you plunk down the $274 for this program.

The four-star rating reflects the fact that all the features of the program work as promised and that the program is a powerful and impressive piece of software engineering. The program falls short of five stars, given that many of the features are not so intuitive and you really need to go to an outside source to find out how to use the program for maximum effectiveness.

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