Adobe Lightroom

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom
is more than merely a Raw converter. It’s a library for your photos, a digital darkroom for raw images, a place for compiling a gallery… It’s a working place within a comfortable environment providing anybody, from a professional to an amateur, with all the necessary tools.
There’s a lot written about Lightroom and we give here but a short review of the most essential features.

Supported cameras and destination formats

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom
just as ACR supports all major camera brands although not all the models are in the list. You can check your camera on our Supported Cameras pages.
As for destination formats, besides the usual jpg and tiff, Lightroom can save converted images to png and psd files.
The editing of the images is undestructive, of course – the source file stays as it is and the changes are applied to the file copy.

Tools

I won’t dwell on the standard set of tools such as white balance, exposure correction, recovery, fill light, brightness, contrast. They are there, beautifully arranged and colorfully highlighted when you start using them.
On top of all the tools sits the familiar and indispensable histogram.
Color-saturation is grouped into Presence panel with clarity and vibrance parameters. While saturation influences all the colors of the image alike, clarity and vibrance work locally – the former adds local contrast and the latter – gives more intensity to low saturated parts only.
Tone Curve tool is a combination of Curves and Levels with an option of adding points to the curve and of shifting four controls - lights, darks, shadows, and highlights, that influence corresponding curve regions. The levels tool is traditional – with 3 pointers at the bottom of the greed.
Hue/Saturation/Luminance trio form the next panel. They have separate sliders for both rgb and cmyk color sets tuning. There’s an option of correcting HSL in grayscale.

Noise reduction/Sharpen tandem has usual parameters plus masking – the unsharp mask filter.

Lens correction and vignetting are well known adobe converters’ features. Same are lens correction and color calibration.

As lightroom is a standalone, it is created to perform the image editing from the beginning to the end. The lightroom various presets and simple tools as straighten, crop, spot and red eye removal fit this pattern. Lightroom user will never need Photoshop unless s/he wants to perform some very specific changes to the image and not the capture to printing procedure.

Aged photo preset

Direct Positive Preset

User Interface

Call me subjective or biased but I love Lightroom design.
The multitude and variability of tools is organized in modules that can be changed through module strip.
Inside each module, the tasks are arranged on panels. All the panels are in a column on the right and you are scrolling down from one to the other as you continue with the editing. The working space is very maneuverable as you, obviously, can minimize, or maximize each panel according to your preferences in the workflow.
The filmstreep below the preview window helps to navigate through edited group of images.
On the left you find workflow organizing tools: navigator, presets, snapshots, and history.
The navigator not only locates the part of the image you see in the preview window at large magnification, but can magnify the part you specify for the time you keep the mouse button pressed with fit to view zoom mode.

The possibility to make a snapshot of your work state in order to get back to it or the usefulness of history need no comments.
The whole arrangement of tools follows the familiar ACR look, with the logic of the workflow preserved. But this logic is put into beautifully designed environment. The dark background, the highlighted controls, the softly moving panels, and the way you can toggle the lights on/off/dim view to single out the image are stunning and very convenient.

Lights dim

Lights out

Little conviniences such as the possibility of correcting exposure by klicking and drugging right in the histogram, or the possibility to compare before ans after views only add positive feelings.

Batchconvert

There’s no ‘batch convert option’ in Lightroom menu. But you can save develop settings and apply them to another single image or a whole group of images with a synchronize option that allows to copy only the settings specified by you.

Image manager

Lightroom has its whole image managing system and not only files and folders window with ratings.
First of all you should import the images to Lightroom in order to work with them. The imported images can be moved, copied, or referenced to the Lightroom Library by different means (including direct transfer from a CD or DVD). There’s a number of things you can do during the process of import – the images can be set to be renamed, or certain presets can be applied.
The program may be set to automatically import photos from a certain - watched - folder.
The organization of imported photos in Lightroom Library also has several levels. All info on the photos is contained in a catalog (the familiarity of library terminology helps here). For the particular purposes the photos can be formed into collections, with the possibility of one photo being in several collections simultaneously. And, finally, within a collection or a catalog similar photos can be put in stalks – a convenient way of finding them quickly and keeping together.

It’s obvious that images can be rated, color labeled, have metadata keywords added too them – all that to make the sorting easier.

Use it today. Download Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 directly. Available only at Adobe.com.