Adobe Photoshop Lightroom
For a great number of professional and non-pro photographers alike, Adobe® Photoshop® Lightroom (or Lightroom®, for short) has become the preferred workflow tool for sorting, processing, editing and printing digital images. At its launch, its elegant user interface set new standards in aesthetics and ease-of-use, despite introducing unfamiliar techniques such as directly grabbing the histogram and stretching/compressing its values. Since then, several other vendors have streamlined their own user interfaces in order to compete head-to-head with this product.
Lightroom is distinct from Adobe Photoshop, being aimed exclusively at photographers and having far fewer retouching and purely graphical facilities. It differs from Photoshop Elements in offering many more image enhancement features for serious photographers up to a professional level. In fact, Lightroom differs from both of the other programs in placing the emphasis on a logical and speedy workflow, always with the option of "Command + E" to place all the current settings for a particular photograph into a TIFF file that opens automatically in Photoshop for further editing.
For the PC-based wedding or events photographer who often shoots 2000 images that need to be whittled down to 50, Lightroom is a logical solution. It divides the workflow into logical groupings: Library, Develop, Slideshow, Print, and Web.
Lightroom starts and finishes in the Library, where you have access to all your photographs, even those stored outside the managed confines of the Library itself. Here you can make initial adjustments to the image using the Quick Develop section, but for serious work you need to launch the Develop module. There, the histogram becomes larger, and, for the first time, interactive. Some photographers say they can do 95% of their correction work in the Basic section at the top without resorting to the other tools which include Tone Curve, Color Adjustments, Split Toning, Detail (noise reduction, chromatic aberration, and sharpening), Vignettes (lens corrections, post-cropping), and Camera Calibration.
Other Lightroom modules are Print, for all types of printed output including contact printing; and Web, where you can put together pages of photographs for publication on the Internet in Flash or HTML format. An extensible architecture lets you add plugins such as uploaders for sending images to your favorite photo sharing sites.
Most importantly, Lightroom is completely non-destructive of your original photos, however much you process any of the 190 camera raw file formats or JPEG, TIFF, and PSD files uploaded to it.
New features in Lightroom 3 included faster performance, world-class noise reduction, lens correction, support for DSLR video files, easy-to-share slide show videos with music, and many others. The new noise reduction facilities, in particular, add a lot of value to the software - making it unnecessary to purchase a separate noise reduction package.
Comment
Superb for browsing, examining, comparing and organizing your images, Lightroom is also great for carrying out global processing tasks, in batches or individually. Its RAW processing is well up to standard, although some photographers still prefer to use software provided by camera manufacturers for the basic conversion, then use Lightroom to sort, reprocess and print the images.
Most people find Lightroom a joy to use, especially on account of its clean, intuitive interface. It is terrific value and is well supported with guides and tutorials.
Tech info
- OS: Windows XP with SP2 onwards; Mac OS X
- Price level: Approx. $200
Adobe Systems
Among other activities, Adobe Systems has long been the dominant supplier of image manipulation software. It provides business, creative, and mobile software solutions for all users of digital communications.
Note: Amazon offers Adobe Lightroom at a very competitive price, as you can see in the panel to the right. It is for both Windows and Mac.
From the same vendor:
- Dreamweaver®
- Illustrator®
- InDesign®
- Photoshop®
- Photoshop® Elements
- Premiere®
©trl