Adobe Lighroom 1.0 is Here!

Adobe has done it again. Photoshop Lightroom is the new Adobe application designed specifically for digital photographers. While anyone can use it professional photographers who shoot RAW images will get the most use out of the app. Basically the program is a work-flow application allowing you to import, organize, edit, and publish you photography all within Lightroom. Since it is an Adobe product it works seamlessly with Photoshop so you wont have to give up any control you might have over your images… You might even find that yourself using Photoshop less.

I got a copy of Lightroom just over a week ago now and have spent a good bit of time playing with it and trying to figure it out. This article is basically an account of what I have found. I plan on writing a few more tutorial articles in the future to help you get more of a handle on what Lightroom can do. I found Lightroom when searching for a better way of organizing my photography. I was using a very bad folder structure that gave me little to no idea of the images I had. When I came upon Lightroom I was first intrigued by the idea of a photography database which is basically what Lightroom creates when you import you photography. You can tag your photos with meta data and keywords that allow you to find what you are looking for much more easily. I used to spend quite a while looking for that one night shot I took a year ago. Now I type night photography into the search panel and up comes every photography that I have tagged “night photography”.

I spend a lot of time looking at images. Lightroom makes it very easy to sort through my images and has a lot of different ways of displaying your images. You can view your entire collection, narrow it down to a specific collection of images, then narrow it down even further using the side by side compare feature. This lets you take a few different images and compare them side by side. This makes it very easy to see the differences between them letting you pick the best image of the few. Once you have selected your image the fun really begins. Lightroom offers digital photographers a huge amount of control over their images. The two panels flanking the the main image viewing area hold the majority of the controls for the program making it intuitive to use and easy to navigate. I had a look at the manual for about 5 minutes and then dove right it instantly understanding the majority of the controls. If you have even a little experience editing images in digital format you will be able to understand how to use this program.

There are five main image handling modules. Library for organizing your images, Develop for tone, color and alignment editing, Slideshow for easily creating projection slide-shows, Print for outputting your work for a printer, and Web for easily creating and posting web pages. Being a web designer I didn’t think that I would have any use for that last one but for it is surprisingly powerful and easy to use. I plan on diving much deeper into all of these features in a series of Lightroom tutorials in the future but for now all you get is  quick overview. I have found this program has already changed the way I work which is exactly what was intended to do. My photography work flow is more streamlined whit less time looking for my photographs and more time taking them.