Adobe Photoshop Lightroom
After a year-long public gestation period, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom software has attained “gold code” status and will soon be available to the world. Along with Apple’s Mac-only Aperture, the cross-platform Lightroom belongs to a new breed of digital photo software oriented around workflow: the process of getting the photos off your camera, organized, enhanced, and output to the medium of your choice. Lightroom by design works primarily (though not exclusively) with RAW-formatted images, and it certainly qualifies as an exceptionally useful and accomplished piece of software.
If you’re one of those who only uses Photoshop for its core photo editing capabilities, and doesn’t need the dozens of other graphic arts features or the complex user interface, then Lightroom or one of the new breed of photographer specific editors is just the ticket for you. In this issue of DigitalPro Shooter we’ll look at the newly announced Adobe Lightroom and also talk a little about how it compares with Apple’s Aperture and LightZone from LightCrafts.
The first big change in Photoshop’s editing paradigm since Layers came with the introduction of Camera Raw. Camera Raw allows non-destructive application of some fairly sophisticated image processing directly on the camera’s raw data. The obvious question photographers began to ask is why they couldn’t have those same powerful functions for use with their JPEGs (like Bibble offers) and in Photoshop itself. Changing Photoshop entirely to address the needs of photographers is impractical, so Adobe has built Lightroom “from the ground up” (their words, not mine) to meet the needs of the serious photographer.
Lightroom Beta 4 also features:
- Groundbreaking changes in the way tone curve adjustments are made and displayed, giving you the highest quality results in an interface that’s easier to use than ever before.
- More streamlined and elegant user interface - We’ve made several changes to the look and feel based on your feedback in the earlier beta releases.
- Customizable interface - You can now display only the controls you want to be visible.
- Precision white balance selection tool
- Facility to easily rename and convert files to DNG after they’ve been imported to the Lightroom library
- Increased interaction between Lightroom library organizational structure and the underlying file system
- Filter and search presets to more quickly find the photographs you want
- Better performance and improved interface for the Web module features
- Develop control improvements based on community feedback, including comments from the Pixmantec user community (welcome!)
