Customer Reviews

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 Upgrade [OLD VERSION]

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When Adobe first released the public beta of the original Lightroom, it seemed like a desperate attempt to compete with Apple's Aperture which Apple seemed to be using to target Adobe's flagship creative tool, Photoshop.

Upon using the beta, however, it became apparent that this was a tool that Adobe had been putting a lot of thought into and while the decision to offer the free public beta may have been an attempt to stave off possible Aperture defectees, the development of the software itself clearly was more than that.

Adobe's new tool would come to herald in a nondestructive editing and organizational workflow that simply would never be possible in the full version of Photoshop without seriously jeopardizing functionality and workflows for existing users.

Today, Lightroom 2 takes that original concept to the next level. Boasting even more powerful non-destructive editing, tighter integration with the full version of Photoshop and a revised and even more streamlined interface (Adobe listened), it is well worth the upgrade price.

If you don't have Lightroom yet and are wondering why you would buy it when you already have Photoshop, ask yourself this: Do you have a digital camera and do you take a lot of pictures with it? If so, does taking them all into Photoshop for adjustments seem time consuming? Does the added storage for saving originals and adjusted copies seem excessive? Do you wish that Bridge acted more like a database than a browser and maybe had the ability to keep track of files even when they weren't available (external or networked hard drive that aren't always available for instance)?

If so, Lightroom may be the tool for you. Will it replace Photoshop? No, but an easy way to think of it is as a tool for dealing with many images that need global adjustments with a few touch-ups where as Photoshop is the tool you'll turn to for composite images and major touch-up/cleanup.

Can you do what you need to in Photoshop without Lightroom? Of course - Photoshop is the top of the line Swiss Army Knife of image editing. Will you be able to work as quickly and efficiently in it as you would Lightroom? Seriously doubtful.

I am not a professional but I have alot of photos I need to keep organized. I used iPhoto, but between it and Photoshop, there were some steps that just slowed down the process. Basically Lightroom is a combination of an organizational application with basic photo editing capabilities. It integrates well with Photoshop for more advanced editing. For my family snapshots though I rarely have to edit outside of Lightroom.

Navigating:
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Basic key commands:
G - Grid view, thumbnails of your photos
E - Loupe, highlighted photo fullscreen
D - Single photo in Develop mode
C - Compare, see two photos side by side, nice when you are looking for the perfect shot.
Command+Option+5 - Web module, I use this frequently to upload behind my site, via Lightroom's ftp upload option.
Command [ or ] - rotates image CW and CCW


Organization:
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I am an organization obsessive, especially about my family photos. I have all of my photos on an external drive and LR is pointed to them. There are basically two types of "folders" in LR Folders and Collections.

-Folders
are just that, they refer to the physical folders/subfolders on your hard-drive and reflect the same structure in LR. If you have a folder named 2008>January>01 on your hard-drive, it will be so within LR. When you import into LR you can choose to 1. add photos without moving. 2. copy them to a new location. or 3. move them to a new location.

-Collections
are "virtual folders" within LR and these actually do not move the photo physically on your hard-drive. This is nice because you may have some photos you want to print, you just drag the thumbnails into a collection folder and you don't have to worry about it floating around somewhere on your computer. (when you actually delete a photo in LR it gives you the option of removing from Lightroom only or remove it from completely from your hard-drive) A new feature of LR 2 is the addition of smart collections. There are many options of smart collections, I use them to collect top rated photos. Here is how. You add a new smart collection which takes you into a little sub menu, where you can set how this folder collects photos. I have one called "top rated" which any photo from my folders rated 4 or 5 stars goes into this collection. So where you can drag and drop your favorite photos into collections you can also set these parameters and LR will do the organization for you. Love this feature. You can set smart folders my rating (0-5 stars) color label, dates... and a couple more options I haven't explored yet. As you can imagine there are countless different ways of making these...

-Importing
I basically plug my memory card into my computer and LR asks if I want to import. I have it set to create a physical folder on my hard-drive and import there. So my photos are organized on import. At this time there are options of renaming the whole set of photos with a custom name for example "las vegas 2008 vacation_etc......jpg"

Editing:
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This is basically the photoshop part of Lightroom, you have basic editing tools in the Loupe (E) but you need to go to Develop Mode/Module (D) for more advanced editing. You basically have control of color in LR, for example, white balance, hue, temperature, tint, brightness, saturation, curve...etc There is also allowances for Lens correction, noise reduction, sharpening, etc. You can do cropping in develop mode as well, which is very simple.

A couple of new tools in LR 2.0, I have only started to play around with are Spot Removal and Adjustment Brush. Spot removal tool comes up like the stamp tool in photoshop, where if you have a spot of dust or a pixel you want to get rid of. This is a two step tool, where you first choose the spot you want to remove, (say a dark spot on someone's cheek) next you choose the area of the photo you want to replace the spot with (a clean area of the person's cheek) and voila the spot is gone. The adjustment brush is nice to have because you can overexpose, underexpose, adjust the contrast, brightness, saturation with a brush tool. This is something I didn't expect out of LR so I will definitely be exploring this tool.

You can also edit in Photoshop pretty seamlessly out of LR. You can edit the original (100.jpg will be the one you will be editing in PS) and see the effects back in LR. Edit a copy in PS (100-edit.jpg will be created in your hard-drive and see it next to the original in LR. Also Edit in PS with LR adjustments, any edits in LR will be exported out into PS.

One thing to keep in mind is that any edit done in LR are NOT HARD EDITS. Meaning, you do not affect the original image until you export that image out of LR. The edits are stored in LR until you do an export out into PS or into a folder on your desktop. Until then all photos can be restored back to their original state.

-Presets:
This is a fun part of LR. Lightroom comes already with some basic presets, which instead of remembering all the steps you took to edit one photo, you can save these steps into "presets". So in Develop mode you adjust the, hue, curve, temperature, detail, saturation..etc. of a photo, and you can save it as a preset, call it "preset outdoor" or something and then you can apply this preset to one or dozens of photos at once. Voila. There are lots of free presets already out there. (do a google search. the flickr lightroom group is a good source for learning) You can also cut and paste the edits of a particular photo and paste in onto a group of photos as well.

Web Module:
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This is also fun too. Basically you enter in your web ftp info into LR and tell it to point to a subfolder on your site. (www.website.com/gallery1) and this is where you upload the galleries too. LR comes with a few prepackaged galleries and flash galleries, you select your photos, choose the web template, edit the template (background color, type etc. and upload. and it's really that simple you have uploaded a gallery behind your site. Obviously you need to learn the basics, but before I had to upload with a ftp client, create the html etc.

All in all, Lightroom really is a fantastic tool. I am still learning alot about it. And I know there are people who prefer Aperture and I will try it out to compare, but LR just felt right for me. Try out the 30 day free trial, test out as much as you can, It is not a cheap program but if you are as excited about this stuff it really is a great tool. Cheers.

Version 2 of 'Adobe Photoshop Lightroom' (LR2) is a worthwhile expansion of last year's successful introduction -- in particular, the welcome capability of enhancing selected regional portions of an image (as against the prior more restrictive global tweaks); a Finder bar that consolidates previously separate searches for dates, keywords and metadata (eg: capture date, camera make, location, etc) into one accessible central location; capacity for huge files (up to 512 MB); as well as dual-monitor support. The option for 64-bit execution in both Mac and Vista will further speed processing (but nowhere near the doubling you'd anticipate) for users having more than 4MB RAM memory.

LR2 is a combination photo cataloging and processing application geared to high-quality high-volume workflow in the wide-gamut photoRGB color space -- the platform-neutral CD installs either the Win or Mac version with minimal hassle; whether Win or Mac, the LR2 screen has a virtually identical look and feel.

If you just want to spruce up family and travel snapshots, LR2 isn't for you; PSE6 autofix would be all you'd need and want -- saving time, space and yet another steep learning curve. If, on the other hand, you want the very best you can squeeze out of your digital camera, and don't mind investing a bit more time and effort, then LR2 comes as close as you can to high-volume production.

At one C-note in the US (shamefully higher elsewhere) the upgrade is well worth the fare in enhancing productivity -- were it not for a little known bug that prevents proper importing of keywords when converting ver 1 catalogs to version 2. [see LR 'User Forum' for Adobe's fix]; one would have expected Adobe Update to have that ironed out some 2 months later or, at the very least, have placed a warning sticker on the outside of upgrade boxes. Even so, that issue does not affect purchasers of the full version 2 release. Otherwise, bug reports seem remarkably mild for such a major overhaul.

If you use the RAW ('digital negative') capability of a DSLR, nothing else beats LR2 which 'develops' the RAW file as it imports the file into the catalog, and retains its 12- or 14-bit per color channel precision throughout ... without ever altering the original 'negative'. This is a far faster process than either Photoshop or PSE6 can deliver. In fact, LR2 has pretty much become the standard for those professional photographers who favor RAW capture. This feature will become all the more meaningful as camera development relentlessly moves towards 16-bit pixels on a full-frame sensor (recall LR2's 512 MP capacity!).

While the great majority of your photos will be print-ready after LR2 'development' a few images might still need some targeted touchups from a dedicated application. Adobe would dearly love for you to use their flagship Photoshop cash cow. But, for most of us using photo inkjet printers, Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 (either Win or Mac) should prove more than adequate, a heck of a lot cheaper, and far easier to use. Conversely, if your photography demands heavy-duty professional CMYK press printing, then Photoshop (or similar) still is the big gorilla. Otherwise: healing, cloning, retouching and even adjustment layering are much the same in PSE6 as in Photoshop; because LR2 has already squeezed out most of the benefits of 16-bit color processing, the PSE6 8-bit/channel RGB limitation is no great handicap.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 has an awkward name (Adobe should just drop the Photoshop out of it and leave it as Lightroom) but that's about the only thing that is awkward. This image editing, image adjusting, image cataloguing application is ideal for serious photographers, professional or amateur, who want to do more with their digital photos than simply fill up space.

While aimed specifically at photographers who shoot in RAW format (i.e., uncompressed, unedited raw information, available as an option on some high-end cameras), Lightroom 2 can also handle JPEGs, TIFFs and other graphic formats. I've used it to keep track of images scanned in with a scanner, of comics created with Plasq's Comic Life and Comic Life Magiq, and similar bits of graphic whimsy. The cataloging and meta tagging functions are easy to use, so you use them; finding and sorting photos is a breeze.

Unlike Apple's Aperture, Lightroom 2 can work on Windows, which could be a plus, depending on your needs. While Aperture always supported multiple monitors, this feature didn't appear in Lightroom until version 2, and it is a welcome addition (you can never have too much monitor space when working with images).

Much like Microsoft's Expression Media (the former iView Media Pro), Lightroom leaves images in ordinary directories, and uses document paths to keep track of everything. This differs from Aperture, which sucks everything into a database. It is easy to back up Aperture's entire database on separate media (a separate file server or separate volume); Lightroom will back up its own database but, since the database doesn't contain the actual images, you are essentially backing up only the metadata.

As for ease of use, Lightroom 2 is easier to do more basic things, and Aperture easier to do more subtle things. Aperture has an edge in organizing photos, but not by much.

If you are running Windows, get Lightroom 2. If you have a Mac, well, it's tough: Lightroom 2 and Aperture are both outstanding.

If you like Photoshop, you should definitely be using Lightroom. It's picked up a few features like red eye fix, spot removal and adjustment brush (this feature alone is worth the upgrade) that make your workflow almost all Lightroom. I don't do high-end art photography or graphics,which calls for more Photoshop, so Lightroom is superb for 98.5% of what I need to do. I have used all versions of Photoshop Elements, CS3 and all versions of Lightroom. IF, I were starting out afresh, I doubt I would need to venture beyond Lightroom.

If you are a photographer, Lightroom is an essential tools for the trade. Going back to the old days, our darkrooms were the essential tool for control over our end results. With digital, it is Lightroom. 2.0 has added a lot of things that pro photgraphers needed added. Get it, try it, and fall in love all over again. :-)

I am a web designer who owns & uses Adobe Suites on both Mac and PC daily, and am skilled in Photoshop and Adobe Camera Raw. Lightroom has added an additional 'photographer's dimension' to my work. I am not a professional photographer, but I now shoot differently because I can anticipate what the developing work will be to make the shot a great shot. Additionally, I have finally started to get all my raw data organized.

So the real difference to me is Lightroom has the tools to make my pictures "pop" - and has a small enough toolset that I can use them all and get predictable results. Photoshop is still used for flyaway hair, spotting, making people thinner, changing/cleaning backgrounds, and in general 'changing the picture'. Lightroom has become my personal success story for pictures I shoot.

The features in Lightroom 2 are well worth the cost to upgrade. Yes, a few bugs need to be addressed. Lighroom VER 1 had them too and Adobe did fix them. I would recommend getting "The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 Book for Digital Photographers (Voices That Matter)" by Scott Kelby. Lightroom like Photoshop is complex program to learn , and it does take some time to master. If you are a photographer that has to sort and process a lot images Lightroom will more than pay for itself in the time that it can saves you.

I have a registered, working version on LR1 on my XP system, and went to install this product (LR2). Unfortunately, I don't have my LR1 keycode - I usually write the keys when I first open the box (both on the cd and a master list of my keycodes that I keep in a cd case with the written-on cd) but I have accumulated a ton of them and misplaced LR1. It's probably around and I'll be able to fully register once it turns up, but bear in mind when you buy this that you'll need your original LR1 keycode to enter along with the one they send with LR2. One nice feature is that you can use it with full features for 30 days while you look for it! Other than the problem that I can't locate my key, it's a great program - powerful, easy to use functions for basic picture tweaking. One complaint: the file management system is a somewhat proprietary with "Libraries" instead of folders and keeps all your changes to the original "Nondestructively" (so you can undo without losing quality.) In both versions, I've found that outputting the finished product is the least intuitive part of the process, and not unlike misplacing my keycode, I've gotten confused as to how my changes were saved (or in my case, lost forever) when I had to re-install. (RTM:)

The equipment I use is a Professional SLR with several prime lenses. I shoot citiscapes,landscapes,wildlife. So I don't need complex laying tools to interchange faces and bodies as are provided in full photshop CS4. The spotting/redeye/cropping/hue/saturation/tone curve/brush/graduated filter tools in LR2 are more than enough. In LR2 these are presented as easy to use sliders on the same screen with your raw camera image, so you can quickly make any adjustments and get on with showing them. All adjustments are stored as 'orders to do later' with your raw image, and they are not applied until you export from LR to print, DVD, HDTV. They remain in the LR2 library as well and you can go back anytime, reset a former adjustment, and do it over differently, change to black and white or whatever. No pixels are ever lost.

LR2 is logical, easy, lossless, and fairly cheap. If you need more exotic tools, add CS4, as LR2 provides for moving images into CS4 for additional work while keeping the original raw image in the LR2 library unchanged. The LR2 book by Martin Evening is so far the best book I've found for how to use the software.