I am in love...with a new software from Adobe (the makers of Photoshop). It is called Lightroom and is described by Adobe as "an efficient way to import, select, develop, and showcase large volumes of digital images." It is designed for professional photographers or amateurs who take a lot of photos.
It is not an easy products to describe and I really didn't understand it until I watched a couple of Adobe's on-line videos and downloaded a 30 day trial description. Within two days, I was in love and plunked out my money. It is so good that a recent article in Popular Photography said its biggest competitor was Photoshop and people might not need buy Lightroom's expensive big brother. Personally, I need both products, but Lightroom does some neat things that Photoshop does not...and Lightroom does some things better than Photoshop!
Another description from Adobe: Lightroom software is the professional photographer's essential toolbox, providing one easy application for managing, adjusting, and presenting large volumes of digital photographs so you can spend less time in front of the computer and more time behind the lens. It is especially designed for photographers who shoot in RAW mode, although it will easily handle just about every known image format on the market today.
Its main purpose is to improve your work flow when you take lots of pictures. Here is how I use the product: I first transfer my images from the camera to a special folder in my computer. After that, I open up Lightroom and "import" the pictures into into the program. When you "import," the program let's you add additional meta data information such as copyright info, and also lets you add keywords to help you organize your photos.
After bringing the photos into the program, you can easily add additional keywords. For instance the first thing I did when I acquired the program was import four days worth of shooting that I did in Yosemite last year. I first added keywords such as Yosemite and California to help organize them. Then I easily clicked on all the photos I had of Bridalveil Falls over those four days and added the keyword Bridalveil and Waterfalls to them. I then did the same thing for the other famous landmarks in Yosemite Valley.
As you add keywords, the program creates a category on the left side of the screen so that you can easily click on a keyword, and only those photos come on line, making it easier to compare and find your best photos. You then can quite easily rate your photos by stars or by color coding them.
After organization, you then can go to work on the images to improve their quality, either individually or on a group basis. You can create your own presets so that you don't have to reinvent the wheel. There are plenty of controls to improve your images, far to numerous to describe here. I especially like the Luminance control which is a more subtle way to add saturation to your images without changing people's skin color.
Its ability to turn color images to black and white is amazing and is far better than Photoshop, (with the possible exception of their brand new version CS3)...but it also adds split toning for b&w images which no version of Photoshop has. There are many more controls for improving your images than those I have briefly mentioned here, but you can go to the Adobe Web site to learn more about them.
As I mentioned above, Lightroom is designed to improve a photographer's work flow. So far we have taken the pictures, organized them, then processed them. The next logical step in the work flow that Lightroom follows is to output the final images...either to prints, the Web, or a slide show. Again, Lightroom has made these steps easy with several different built-in templates for all three. Printing different size prints as well as proof sheets is easy...just pull up a template, add your pictures and print. For the Web, there are several templates, either regular HTML or using FLASH. Again just choose your images, push a button and your Web pages are created for you.
If you think that Lightroom might be for you, head over to the Adobe Web site and watch the videos and see for yourself. You can then download a 30 day trial version and try it out. By the way, the trial version is NOT a crippled version. It is the full version. Lightroom now sells for $299, but Adobe originally put it on sale for the first few months as a special buy for $199. There are still a few places on the Web where you can still get it at the $199 price, so if you think Lightroom might be for you, I would think about looking at it right away.
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