Customer Reviews

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3

5 star:		(106)
4 star:		(27)
3 star:		(15)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Those familiar with Photoshop might wonder why an additional product should be needed to manage digital images. I would offer this difference: Photoshop is a program for image manipulation; it's for folks who want to change their photographs or create new substance in an image. Lightroom is a program that, primarily, expedites photography workflow. [By using the term "workflow," I don't mean to imply that it's geared only to those who are in the profession of photography; amateurs and hobbyists alike (like I am), who also wish to prepare quickly and print images, can benefit from this highly-practical and time-efficient program.] You can "tweak" pics very nicely with Lightroom, but Photoshop's the paragon for substantial alteration.

Lightroom 3 simplifies enormously the process of preparing photo captures for use, whether as web or print applications. It facilitates quick organization & preview, raw enhancement, printing, and web uploading of photos.

The "library" module permits quick organization of picture groups. The amazing, work-saving catalog system allows rapid naming, labeling & flagging, copying, metadata editing & review, and filtering of files, then presents a robust preview for easy access to the rest of the photographic workflow. A stellar feature of the file handling is the (relatively) low memory burden placed on computer RAM -- most all of these activities originate from small files that make good use of the .dng formatting.

The "develop" module contains all of the necessary controls to adjust exposure, correct lens aberrations, establish a good white point to remove color casts, manipulate color and grayscale attributes, crop, retouch discreet areas of a photo, and, generally, to perform all the actions of an after-the-fact camera, insofar as these are possible, to improve the raw (proprietary or .dng) images that come from a digital source. White point color correction is particulary easy - and requires only a few skillful mouse motions (as opposed to Photoshop, in which color correction is either mindlessly automated or involves multi-step curve adjustments). One very fine feature in Lightroom is the ability to create instantly a "virtual copy" of your photo, which you can edit, change, enhance, etc. -- all without altering your original file.

The "slideshow" module lets you combine photos into a presentation for automatically viewing a sequence of photos as slides. Text can be added, as well as an intro slide and a conclusion slide. You can even add a music file to the background of your presentation, and the program will automatically time your slideshow to the length of your music clip. Slideshows can then be downloaded into a variety of different video formats (including mp4, which I use most frequently).

Finally, the "print" or "web" modules expedite the last-step output to the desired final product. There's a marvelous preview of your photo presented prior to the actual printing. Multiple photos or copies of the same photo can be easily grouped and previewed on a single sheet for cost-effective printing. Downloading to the web is a cinch. There's even a feature to upload your photos automatically to a Flickr account and (in the updated version) to Facebook.

Though a learning curve is associated with attaining mastery of Lightroom, I think the controls are quite intuitive. As a virtual neophyte who has had the product for only a short time, I've been able to output some very satisfying images to my printer.

I've been an Adobe fan since the dark ages of computer imagery in the 1980's [Pagemaker license number was issued by Aldus], and this product once again confirms their hegemony in the realm of computer graphics.

Conclusion: Lightroom 3 is a highly recommended program for those who like to snap and publish digital photos.

I'll start off by saying I thought $300 for a photo program was more than I wanted to spend. I had tried the 30 day trial when LR2 came out, but couldn't get in enough keyboard time during the 30 day trial period. I decided to try the Beta when LR3 B1 came out and actually got about 70 days under my belt before B2 expired.
I had bought and used Elements 3 and 7, and while pretty good enhancers, there organizational abilities were weak. By weak, I mean, once they were catalogued and or key worded, they were fine, but the key wording was tedious.

Enter LR3. It doesn't have the capability of Elements (or photoshop either, I assume) but it does have enough capability to handle 90+% of what I do. What I usually do is correct color and exposure, saturate or desatureate some colors to enhance the image or de-emphasize the back ground, sharpen things up a bit and or decrease noise, mostly luminous, and apply the lens correction feature. I have also used the curves feature and the section I think they call shade, saturation and Lumination to make local adjustment to brightness and color. All in all, I can make almost all reasonably exposed photos, (+-2.5 stops) look pretty good. The program doesnot have the capability to distort shape, color or texture for artistic purposes, which I do not do at this time. The program does have a perspective correction section which I have had reasonable success with on the small number of uses I have had with it.

I have dabbled in the other features, such as healingand red eye reduction (easy and effecetive), paint brushing, tinting etc. My experience here is limited, but the features seem to be effective.

Its real standout is organization. I had about 11,000 photos in my file which I reduced to about 8000 by using the easy to use "compare mode". I also keyworded these images in about 2 weeks of daily effort averaging 2 to 4 hours per day. ( a concentrated effort for sure). The keywords are easy to set up and the program's auto-type and table of recent keywords is very helpful and a great time saver.

In general, I say if your main goal is organization of your file, perhaps coupled with a desire for slide show, this program has a lot of features to consider, (I did not use the print or post to facebook sections at all). If you're into MAJOR image correction or enhancement, for artistic purposes, this program will fall short. I hope this helps.

Lightroom3 is a fantastic piece of software that is an excellent tool for the professional or serious amateur. There are many reviews here and elsewhere on the web that describe its functionality in great detail, so there is no need for me to bother with that here.. I use the software and recommend it highly. I would suggest that you take the time to tour the Adobe Learning site that has many excellent video tutorials that will give you an in depth look at the software in actual use in real life situations. A picture (or video in this case) is definitely worth a thousand words.
See on the web: [...]

However, I want to bring to your attention one serious potential technical problem with software designs like Lightroom. My own professional background has included a stint in software design and programming so the following is information that I want to share with you, but it is information that you will most likely not hear about in the photographic press or other locations that are likely to be talking about Lightroom. Here is the issue: * Central to its core and necessary for operation of Lightroom is a proprietary database system that holds all user entered data for recipe or change files to your RAW development, as well as dozens of other variables and user entered and program generated data and variables. Lightroom *does not* embed the change information into the image files. This is a very dangerous design leap in the making of Lightroom. Why do I say that? What can go wrong here?

Very simply put, if anything corrupts or makes unavailable that proprietary database, then you can kiss good by what might be hundreds of hours and possibly years of work that you inputted while using the program over whatever amount of days, weeks, months or years that you were using Lightroom as your tool of choice for handling your photo library.

It is not clear that Lightroom can make sense of and reconstruct its database in the event of a replaced hard disk unless the RAW and JPEG image files are placed on the new replacement disk in the exact format and file hierarchy and structure of the old disk. Therefore, you must keep image backups of your disks, just having the data is not enough, the structure of the data in the file system must be preserved. You must assure yourself that your backup software can place back this disk image if called upon to do so in the future.

Additionally several other things might cause you real problems: You can be so foolish as to not back up the database files to multiple locations that will survive the common physical risks of fire, theft, hardware crashes, etc. We will assume that you are a good computer user and have an off premises back up system and also at least two other removable and transportable hard drives onto which you will keep your back up database files. So you have that base covered. No worry there for you!

It's number #3.) that most people never think about but happens once in a great while. It is, admittedly, a long shot but so is winning the lottery. But people do win, or in this case loose. It is this "gottcha" that does happen in the high tech world of computers and even the most sophisticated users, from government agencies to large private corporations, have been "burned" by it. Simply put the vendor (in this case Adobe) either goes out of business or changes the internal design of its proprietary database and you only then have access to your data for however long into the future that you can keep a running copy of the original software on your machines.

Don't laugh, and before you flame me for this review, I will mention two of the most famous examples of this happening: One is Western Digital Corp that used a third party vendor for years that supplied them with an ISAM engine database image backup system. WD sort of fell asleep at the switch and forgot to watch out for its vendors health. The vendor went out of business and WD was stuck with thousands of customers that could not get their backup data off of the WD drives that were affected. The second example is at NASA, that to this day has millions of image files from early space exploration that was encoded in a proprietary format that, inexplicably, over time, the programming code to decode was somehow lost or destroyed. Actually, there are many more examples, and the very nature of the programming world, it seems, is to be littered with the remains of old dead code systems that no one any longer uses, understands or has the time to bother with.

I only mention all this, just so that someone has told you. You are now informed, and if you ever do win this lottery you can not say that you did not know it could happen to you.

Lightroom 3 was an awesome addition to my studio. Prior to using lightroom I was using Bridge and PhotoShop to process all my photos. If you go out and shoot a few photos a week I would not recommend dropping the cash to get lightroom. If you shoot or want to shoot 1000+ images a day and don't want to spend most of your time in front of a computer doing post work, buy lightroom 3.

Performance: Lightroom 3 works amazingly well on computer running a 64bit OS like win7. After watching a few tutorial videos on the program I was able to add lightroom to my work-flow and get files edited and to my clients about twice as fast as just using BR/PS.

Great for:
1.Noise reduction (simple and awesome)
2.Making small to medium adjustments to photos quickly
3.Managing photo meta data
4.cataloging and sorting
5.getting images to the web
6.printing packages
7.slide shows
8....

While I do have a nice DSLR that does shoot RAW, most of the photos I've taken over the past few years of our new daughter have been with a variety of Point and Shoot cameras (JPEGs). Like most new parents, we quickly accumulated thousands of JPEG images. Over the past few years, I've used iPhoto, Elements and Picasa, but for a variety of reasons (poor memory handling, feature limitations, etc.), became frustrated with each. So I was somewhat reluctant to pick up a copy of LR3 as I know many of the features are geared towards the professional photographer.

I've been working in LR3 for a few months now and really love it. Although I haven't gotten to my RAW collection yet, I've processed over 7000 images of my 2-year old daughter. I use LR3 mainly for its organizational features and while I have a copy of Photoshop, I have not used it once since I find the editing features in LR3 more than adequate for my needs. If you don't need to do serious image manipulation (in particular with special effects and alteration), LR3 is quite powerful and likely more than you will need. The White Balance, Exposure, Noise Reduction and Sharpening tools have actually saved many images that I originally had thought were throw-aways. Certainly, working with RAWs is where LR3 shines, but I wouldn't let that preclude you from using LR3 if all you have are JPEGs.

LR3 really shines with its handling of metadata and specially Keywording. The Keyword Sets and Suggestions are absolutely wonderful and save huge amounts of time. I only wish they allowed more than just 9 per set (which is apparently done for numeric keypad shortcuts). At least, you can use auto-complete when typing directly. LR3 does not include any sort of Facial Recognition engine, which has become quite common in other products like Picasa, iPhoto and even Elements. It's surprising that they brought the technology into Elements but not LR3. Personally, I find the Keywording to work quite well although it is not quite the same as there is no association with the keyword and actual face. Hopefully, LR4 will add this feature and allow for existing people Keywords to be linked in. But I suspect many professional photographers, who have a lot of influence on the product, may nix their interest in adding Facial Recognition to the product.

So I use iPhoto in conjunction with LR3 for a number of reasons. First off, LR3 does have a Print module, however, like many features it too is geared toward the professional who likely has a decent printer in-house. There are no options for 3rd party printing of Photo Books, Calendars, Cards, etc., that you have with iPhoto (and other products). I also prefer using iPhoto for Slide Shows (where I export a collection from LR3 to a folder to import into iPhoto). The Slide Show support in LR3 is quite limited. There is no control over the transitions between slides and you can only have one song at a time. Still, I use the LR3 impromptu slide shows against filtered metadata all the time with my daughter. I think slide shows is one area where the team can make big improvements with LR4. The last reason I use iPhoto is for publishing to MobileMe. LR3 does have a 3rd party plug-in that seems to work OK, but I figure safer to let the owner of MobileMe (Apple) do this for me with their own software.

LR3 does support video, but it is quite limited (don't expect to do much editing within LR3). You cannot actually watch a video from within LR3. When you want to play a video, it farms out to an external player. You can add metadata (Keywords) which is nice. I actually keep a copy of Picasa around just so I can rotate videos 90 degrees (the ones from cameras that don't get oriented properly). And you can't alter the Capture Time for a video like you can with an image (this is useful if you forgot to change camera for daylight savings or battery died and messed up internal date of camera).

I've also used the Web module for one website that I manage. The module comes with some preloaded templates that are either Flash or HTML-based. There are quite a few templates, but you'll soon discover that they are mostly the same physical layout with only difference being the colors. The templates are quite simple so not likely something you'd use for a nice website. But there are some nice 3rd party ones out there at reasonable prices. I should say that the Web module is still a little buggy and has hung LR a few times on me.

If you're somewhat new like me, I highly recommend getting George Jardine's videos on the Library and Develop modules. Scott Kelby's book The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 Book for Digital Photographers (Voices That Matter) is also excellent for intro and getting your workflow just right. It is worth spending time upfront deciding on how you want things organized (folder structure and location, folder naming, file naming, metadata, keywording, etc.). I also highly recommend Victoria Bampton's Adobe Lightroom 3 - The Missing FAQ - Real Answers to Real Questions asked by Lightroom Users book (and PDF).

Despite some of the short-comings, LR3 is truly a fabulous product and one that is just going to get better with time. I also think that it is a great product for folks who aren't necessarily professional or even serious photographers, but rather folks who just like a well organized collection of their photos and videos.

Before and After
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I studied photography in college when digital photography was just in its infancy. I still remember the days of going to the darkroom to develop film while making prints on enlargers. But all this has changed with digital darkroom programs. Of all of them I would say Lightroom 3 is one of the most powerful programs to use.

What It Can Do
----------------
Although you can do simple things with it such as removing photo noise from images or adjusting color balance, it offers a deep well of customization routines that will allow you to manipulate and enhance your photos without risk of losing your original images. Those who have gone through the regimen of developing photos in a darkroom will immediately recognize and appreciate the power of LR3. For those who haven't been in a darkroom, they will still enjoy the many features of this program.

I have been using LR3 for about a month now and have just scratched the surface. There are an amazing number of features that help you to get rid of spots on photos, sharpen detail in images, change or remove certain colors from objects in the scene, produce print packages, and apply an astonishing set of "presets" and plugins for creative results. It can also process "raw" digital images for conversion to JPG or other file systems. It recognizes many proprietary raw files from different camera manufacturers.

It also serves as a good catalog program for all of your images and can be helpful in sorting everything out for you. LR3 gives you the ability to add annotations, information, comments and other details to your photos for quick reference. In addition you'll be able to view shooting information regarding shutter speed, camera lens setting, automatic settings, ISO and a host of other details that you can customize for viewing.

There are some limitations to the program such as not being able to add text, adding fancy schmancy frames and borders, and other things because it is aimed primarily for enhancing photos instead of being gimmicky. You may find yourself using Photoshop Elements in conjunction with LR3 to get more of a "complete" package.

Some Issues to Consider
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On the downside there is no printed manual and you'll have to get all your instructions from Adobe's online lessons. Personally speaking I think this trend of not providing a manual for software programs is a bad move. If you are going to pay so much for a program, a manual *should* be included. For those who want to "go it alone" without reading the online instructions you can figure out many of the functions by just experimenting. Some of the terminology is different such as using "import" instead of "open file," "export," instead of save, and some other not so obvious things.

If you have an old computer system do not expect to get fast results in processing. Don't blame the program if your system is slow or not able to handle the processing power that is needed to run LR3. You can't get Ferrari speed driving a Volkswagen. ;D

The last downside is the cost of LR3. While the program is extremely useful, the high price-tag may cause many people to go into "sticker shock" due to the cost of admission. The good news is that Adobe offers a free 30 day trial of LR3 that is completely functional so you can play with it for a test run.

Conclusion
------------
If you are seeking a top notch image editing program that can enhance and correct your photos, expand your creativity, and provide a strong feature set, Lightroom 3 may be right for you. If you are a casual photographer, there are free or less expensive alternatives out there than LR3 that don't do as much but can still suit your needs.

As a learning photographer, I was quite happy using Picasa to edit my pictures, but I was always reading photo magazines that talked about Lightroom and all the articles were geared toward that software (or photoshop). I don't have much money for photo equipment, but when the tax return came through, I immediately started looking for a new lens. It was my wife who suggested that I think about Lightroom instead. I downloaded the free trial version from their website. It's a complete installation with all the features, but it only lasts 30 days. Within a day or two, I was hooked.

I like the organization better than Picasa. I like the format better than Picasa (dark colors everywhere so you can see your photos better. I like the editing better than Picasa. You can do so much more, and it is so much easier to do it. Now I can give my photos that "pop" that I always envied in professional pictures.

There's much more that I could say, but you can try it yourself for free. Just make sure you are able to buy the software after your free period, because I don't think you'll want to go back to what you had before. And don't forget to take advantage of the free tutorial videos on the Adobe website or any of the hundreds that are out on the web. Lightroom has more features than you can learn by trial and error.

I have been using Lightroom since version 2. I use it primarily as a database to filter all of my images. I love the whole idea of using an application like this to keep track of all my photos, and the keywords and Smart Collections are such a great idea. Once everything gets cataloged, It's very fun to sort through thousands of pictures and find just what I'm looking for. I was really excited to see what LR 3 would be like, but unfortunately the software has taken a turn for the worse, performance-wise.

The software installed okay, but the performance on my brand-spanking new computer with loads of RAM was completely abysmal. Lightroom was unresponsive most of the time, just opening up my previous catalog of images. And this is where the problem came in. Adobe has horrible customer service. They basically discontinued the "Help" files within the program itself and instead send you off to user forums to try to get help. This is a big software company that makes some of the most popular image-editing software out there, and for them to scrimp in this area is unconscionable. I found those forums to be populated by extremely arrogant, rude people who seem to think that Adobe can do no wrong and any problem is user-created and thus to be ignored.

I have been able to limp along with the program, and the latest update to version 3.3 did help performance slightly, but I'm at the point where I don't even know if I should continue to add photos into this software. I've put a lot of time and effort into these images and putting them into Lightroom, so I hope it will continue to be improved and worked on, but now I'm starting to have my doubts.

One other thing is that the software has a pretty steep learning curve and buying a book on it is a must if you've never worked with it or done anything with digital asset management before.

One other thing: I know that other manufacturers do this as well as Adobe, and that it's supposedly to "prevent piracy," but I really resent the fact that I no longer own the software that I buy, I'm renting a license for it. I want to own my products, I don't want Adobe controlling my purchases and I hate the fact that I have to turn off software on my desktop computer in my office so that I am able to use it on my laptop in the living room. It's insane. I would be willing to pay extra for the rights to actually own my software and do what I want with it.

NOTE: I have changed my stars from 2 to 3 on this product since the last update (3.4.1). The performance issues have been fixed, at least on my computer, and it now runs smoothly.

 

I am a professional wedding and portrait photographer and Lightroom is my staple editing program. It has replaced Photoshop for 99% of the work I do, which is a good thing. While Photoshop excels at single image editing, Lightroom excels at working with a large number of images at one time. While Photoshop's tools are much more deeper and more powerful than Lightroom's, you will spend MUCH more time editing an image in Photoshop than in Lightroom. I can take a single out-of-camera RAW image in Lightroom and have it perfect in Lightroom in 15-30 seconds. Photoshop is a much slower process.

Lightroom has a "web" and "print" module, but all I use for my work is the "library" and "develop" module, so my review will focus on those nodes of the software. I will also not attempt to list or compare every single feature of this software, as they are legion and would be a longer review than I'd want to type and you'd want to read. After years of development and improvement, Lightroom's image quality is the best in the business.

For the weddings I cover, I typically take between 1700-2200 images. With Lightroom I can cull these down to 400 or so and have them edited in probably 5-6 hours. Here is how I do this:

- Offload my cards via Windows Explorer and put all of the images in a single folder. This can also be done within lightroom, but the process is somewhat slow and clunky. I find that I prefer Explorer for offloading cards.
- In the library module, import all of my photos into the library, without moving the files on the hard drive.
- Upon import, select the preset I'd like applied to my images. For weddings and portraits, I have a homebrew preset which adjusts exposure, tone, saturation, and camera calibration. This preset will apply itself to all imported images.
- After import, go to the Library module and thumb through all of the images in full screen mode. Hit the "P" button to flag images which look good. This usually turns out to be the top 1/3 images.
- Once the top images are flagged, set the filter to "flagged" to show only the flagged images.
- Now go through and compare the images, culling out the ones which aren't as good as you thought, or are duplicates. Lightroom has an *excellent* survey mode for comparing images. This is invaluable for reaching the final selection as it allows you to carefully compare images which may be very similar so that you make the best selection possible.

IMAGE SORTING AND SELECTION TIME: 80-100 minutes

Once the final images are selected I typically wind up with around 400 images vs the original 1800 or so. Now it's time to edit those images. Here is the process I go through.

- For an image, it's best to adjust exposure and tone before color. Color will shift somewhat as you adjust exposure, so if you try to correct color first, you might have to do it again after an exposure adjustment.
- After exposure is set, adjust tone if necessary. Increasing exposure tends to lead to very dark blacks while decreasing exposure tends to lead to very light blacks. Tweaking the tone curve at this point helps to correct this.
- Once exposure and tone are correct, then fix color. I typically start by "clicking" an area of the image very close to white, then adjusting warmth (blue/yellow) and tint (red/green) from there to perfect the image. This can be tricky sometimes and you may spend a little more time getting the color perfect.

At this point, I have the baseline edit finished. I might do more advanced edits such as localized adjustments (darker skies, brighter faces on subjects, etc), or to clone distracting elements out of the picture. If there is still work that needs to be done, I can right click an image and go to "edit in photoshop" to bring an image up in CS5 for more advanced work. This is done very rarely, to be honest.

Once an image is completely edited, you can copy and paste this edit onto other similar images. This is critical and will save you a TON of time. Lightroom's paste settings dialog is extremely powerful and will allow you to past as many or as few of the settings adjustments as you'd like. So basically you can spend 2 minutes perfecting one photo, then 5 seconds pasting those corrections onto the next 100 photos. Time saved: lots Frustration and tedium saved: priceless.

TOTAL SORTING/CULLING TIME FOR 1800 IMAGES: 1.5-2 HOURS
TOTAL EDITING TIME FOR 400 IMAGES: 3-4 HOURS.

Keep in mind, much of this is repetitive work and can be tedious. I find that I need to take a short break every hour or so to stay fresh.

So for me as a working professional, Lightroom is the ultimate time saver tool. My time is very valuable and Lightroom saves me enough time in a month to more than completely pay for the price of the software.

There are some excellently written reviews on Lightroom, and I encourage you to read them in order to get a better idea of the specific uses of Lightroom or the value of particular tools. If you have found yourself asking the following two questions, then please read on through my brief review (and then go back to read the more detailed product reviews noted by other readers as "Helpful"!):

1. I love being able to take all sorts of photos digitally, but how can I ever store and manage them efficiently?
2. I've tried editing my photos in Photoshop and/or Photoshop Elements, but the menu options alone are enough to set my head spinning, so I've given up and used only the most basic editing possible through Microsoft tools -- Is there anything better out there that I can use with ease?

When you start using Lightroom, you'll find that you can be successful (and happy) without even using some of the more powerful tools available. For me, this means I've been able to grow my photo managing and editing abilities/skills without frustration. Because the program is built around organization and management, you can return to previously-edited photographs and make quick adjustsments (or all-new edits) and neither destroy nor alter the original photo or previous edits.

I've been a rank amateur/hobbyist for nearly forty years (OK, maybe a bit longer), and I grew up in the film world. I took classes in photography when developing and printing your own film was part of the work. I was afraid of digital photography, and I've been a late convert. The whole concept of "White Balance" was like a black box to me, and it (along with ASA/ISO numbers above 800) made me uncomfortable to point of queasiness. Lightroom really has helped me enter into digital photography comfortably. Two years ago I didn't know what it meant to shoot RAW. One year ago I didn't know whether it only used up more space on an SD card or could have real value. Now I shoot only RAW,* and it is mainly because I know that I can make so many more adjustments, alterations and fixes in Lightroom that if I shot .jpeg files.

This software is not cheap, but if I know of someone just starting in digital photography -- regardless of whether they will use a point-and-shoot camera, or a "crop" camera, or even full-frame camera -- I will recommend they include this software from the very beginning. I wish I had!

* OK. Yes, there are some circumstances where RAW just may not work, but these are the exceptions. I venture to say that 98% or better of all my photos are RAW. If I didn't try to shoot indoor sports action, then I'd be much closer to 100%.