Adobe Light­room 2

In my pre­vi­ous post on Dig­i­tal Asset Man­age­ment, I briefly out­lined some of the entry level con­tenders for DAM soft­ware such as Google Picasa and Adobe Pho­to­shop Ele­ments. In the rest of this series, I will look at some of the heavy weights, the pro­fes­sional asset man­age­ment sys­tems. I will start with the one I use most —  Adobe Light­room. Not sure if this is a good idea as I it is the prod­uct that I am most inti­mate with, know­ing its strengths and weak­nesses. Let’s get started…

Adobe Light­room is now the ele­phant in the room of DAM soft­ware. As John Nack (of Adobe) revealed a short while back, Adobe Light­room pretty much owns the pro­fes­sional mar­ket, beat­ing it’s next near­est com­peti­tor, Apple Aper­ture, by a con­sid­er­able mar­gin. I have been using it since the very early beta’s (and Pix­man­tic Raw­Shooter before that, which Adobe bought to kick start Adobe Light­room), and hope­fully, am some­what qual­i­fied to give you a non-professionals opinion.

Library / Cat­a­log Tools:

This is the mod­ule of Light­room where I spend 85%+ of my time. I am slowly work­ing through my back cat­a­log of images, and suf­fer­ing from OCD as I do, I insist on all images being cor­rectly located, named, tagged, etc. Light­room is very strong here, hav­ing the abil­ity to apply exten­sive key­word tag hier­ar­chies to images. A strong file renam­ing engine, along with vir­tual col­lec­tions (and col­lec­tions of col­lec­tions), and numer­ous meth­ods of catago­riz­ing images (by colour label, by star rat­ing, and by Pick/Reject) are avail­able. Apples’ Aper­ture was the first major DAM prod­uct to be announced in my mem­ory, but imme­di­ately there was a lot of critism regard­ing it’s approach to asset man­age­ment; namely migrat­ing all man­aged images INTO it’s data­base, remov­ing all exter­nal access. While this had it’s mer­its, Adobe chose to go another way, win­ning lots of friends in the process, allow­ing the Light­room user to:

• Ref­er­ence the image file from it’s exist­ing location
• Man­age the image file by copy­ing it to a man­aged loca­tion, still on the file sys­tem and acces­si­ble from other tools (I will touch on this again at a later date).
• Man­age the image file by mov­ing it to a man­aged location.
• Man­age the image file by con­vert­ing it to Adobe’s open DNG RAW stan­dard, and mov­ing it to a man­aged location.

Image Edit­ing:

The sec­ond major mod­ule with Adobe Light­room is the develop mod­ule, which is where the real fun starts. Here is where you apply image adjust­ments such as expo­sure, white bal­ance, con­trast, sat­u­ra­tion, and a host of other mod­i­fi­ca­tions. Ver­sion 1.0 of Light­room restricted these adjust­ments to the whole of the image, requir­ing the use of Pho­to­shop for more tar­geted adjust­ments such as remov­ing blem­ishes, or other dis­trac­tions. Thank­fully with ver­sion 2, Adobe intro­duced the adjust­ment brush and other spe­cific pixel level adjust­ment tools. Now you can remove spots and blem­ishes, smooth skin, whiten eyes and teeth, apply grad­u­ated fil­ters as well as adjust other set­tings relat­ing to the entire image. You still need Adobe Pho­to­shop in order to per­form more advanced adjust­ments such as panora­mas, col­lages, HDR, or other major image surgery. I would rec­om­mend Mar­tin Evenings’ book if you want to get best value out of the Develop mod­ule though…

Alter­ing white bal­ance in Adobe Lightroom

Exports / Sharing:

In some respects this is where Adobe Light­room has lost ground on the com­pe­ti­tion, espe­cially Apple Aper­ture. Out of the box, Light­room can export images to disk, and to CDROM (not on 64 bit win­dows), as well as hav­ing mod­ules to gov­ern print­ing, cre­ation of a web gallery, and a slideshow. Doesn’t sound to bad… but Face­book, Flickr, and other online resources are now becom­ing major mar­ket­ing tools for pho­tog­ra­phers, and export­ing directly to these loca­tions is a capa­bil­ity now offered by some com­peti­tors. Another major gap was the abil­ity to export to a Photo Book cre­ation ser­vice. This capa­bil­ity may feel a lit­tle con­sumer ori­en­tated, but again, it is offered by Apple Aper­ture.  Yes, export plu­g­ins are avail­able, and I use them myself; they are very capa­ble, but the lack of a native abil­ity to export to the major host­ing sites feels like an omission.

The X Factor:

What do I mean by the X Fac­tor? Basi­cally, why would I buy this over a com­pet­ing prod­uct when, on paper,  the com­pet­ing prod­uct is more capa­ble. And for Adobe Light­room, the X Fac­tor is this… com­mu­nity. Light­room has a mas­sive com­mu­nity around it, pro­duc­ing tuto­ri­als, pre­sets, blogs, reviews, reports, etc. When you are get­ting started with a prod­uct as advanced as Light­room, that really helps and can’t be overlooked.

Details:

• Link: http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshoplightroom/
• Cost: US$ 229
• Plat­forms: Win­dows, Mac OSX
• Buy: Adobe Pho­to­shop Light­room 2