Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2
Sunday, March 15th, 2009
Adobe Lightroom V2 for Windows and Mac. Lightroom provides an efficient way to import, select, develop, and showcase large volumes of digital images.
User Ratings and Reviews
5 Stars Great for a photographer
Lightroom (why do we need the photoshop in front?) is great software for moving through images rapidly and making darkroom style adjustments. Its perfect for my needs
5 Stars Software with much depth
Lightroom 2 represents a significant set up from version 1. Version 1 on the Mac suffered from too much. Primarily too much comparison to Aperature. But with this release and the 2.2 upgrade Lightwave finally comes into it’s own.
Unlike a photo editor, Lightroom2 focuses on the management of your photo portfolio. After installation, you tell it where you store your photos and it imports the photos into Lightroom. This is a major improvement from version 1, although this will take a bit of time (about 45 minutes for approximately 13,000 photos). It will then monitor your photo directories for change, although this is not as quick as google’s editor
But those are minor quibbles. Lightwave adopts an assembly line like approach to dealing with photos and it does so very effectively.
Starting with your photo library, you move on to “develop” for a photo or a group of photos. Develop allows you to adjust parameters of the photos ranging from exposure to overlays to layout. This really is the heart of program and what makes it so powerful. This is not at all like photoshop; these aren’t at all competing products, rather they complement each other.
If that’s all Lightwave had to offer, it would a pretty good product, but Adobe has created the ability to develop plug-ins that allow Lightwave to interact with both other programs (such as DxO) to websites (Flickr, Facebook). Don’t consider this an exhaustive list; rather, just search the web for “Lightroom Plugins” to understand the breadth of these plugins.
In summary, this product is valuable tool for people who care about their photos. It’s powerful, intuitive (well, for an Adobe product), and is not a product that you will easily outgrow.
5 Stars Best Thing to Happen to My Workflow…since I 1st Heard the Word “Workflow”
Before discovering this program, I had files all over the map, a terribly disorganzied disaster area of jpgs mixed with RAW mixed with Lord knows what. Additionally, my post-processing routine was anything but. Hours of tedious and frustrating work.
Along comes Lightroom and cleaves my workflow in half! It also has streamlined my archives in such a way that I can find images from several years ago that under normal circumstances would have been buried in a mountain of kilobytes, never to be seen again.
My present day operation is a genuine joy. I have not had a need to even glance at Photoshop CS3 except for the more complicated retouching operations or major projects (movie posters, promos, composites, etc.).
This is a clear winner in comparison to Aperture as well. I’m a die hard Mac guy for my photo work, don’t get me wrong. Aperture is clever and solid, but lacks something in intuition that Lightroom has in spades.
LOVE this software…and can’t fathom life in the studio without it now.
3 Stars WONDERFUL program. SERIOUS bug
Lightroom is a 5-star product, with a serious bug in this version. Hence the 3-star rating. I will definitely buy version 2.3, which Adobe says should correct this bug.
I am a Mac user — I don’t know if this bug also exists in the PC version.
First, the great product:
I have thousands of photos (including many duplicates) in disorganized folders all over my disk After using the trial versions of both Lightroom 2 and and Aperture for several weeks, Lightroom was my clear winner.
Big reasons:
1) Lightroom’s internal catalog corresponds directly to the Finder’s folder/file structure. You can change the name of a file, or move it to a new folder, all within Lightroom.
2) Lightroom can keep several edited versions of one master photo. These are stored as edits, which saves space, and makes it easy to keep several versions for special purposes (e.g., web postings, email, printing).
3) The photo editing is awesome. I suspect I’ll have very little need for PhotoShop.
Now the problem: Version 2.2 has a very serious bug (for me).
If you mistakenly import non-standard files, in particular the “shapeimage..” files Mac uses in websites, Lightroom crashes and cannot be restarted without deleting the entire catalog and reimporting all the photos.
When I called Adobe they were very helpful. I quickly reached a knowledgeable person, who says this is a known bug, to be corrected in version 2.3, out in a few months they hope.
4 Stars Almost Perfect Photo Tool
Lightroom 2, can’t help you with Aunt Lucy’s photo, if you want flames shooting out of her head…. that would be Photoshop. However, what Lightroom 2 offers is a full-range of editing tools to make the photo of Aunt Lucy look fantastic. As a professional nature/wildlife photographer, it has everything I would expect from a top-of-the-line photo editing product, and everything I need (almost) to review, select, store, convert, edit and print a large number of RAW photo files. The one thing I would like to see added, perhaps in the next upgrade, is a watermarking tool. It’s also a very speedy and solid performer, which is absolutely required for a professional workflow.
I struggled with other photo storage, conversion and editing tools for several years. Often, having to use multiple tools to perform various workflow functions I needed. I’m very happy to have discovered one tool that does it all…. Lightroom 2.
