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MillimeterEdit Review: Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2
Jan 1, 2009 12:00 PM, Reviewer: Franklin McMahon
New interface and extension of existing features mark significant improvement.
Lightroom's new local-adjustment brush expands your touchup options. Typically, you'll work with a small brush — maybe a few pixels in diameter — to dodge and burn, sharpen, brighten, etc. Think of this brush as full-screen and resizable. For example, you may have a picture of a sunset; use the local-adjustment brush to darken the water and brighten the sky. Rotate the brush to do the opposite — lighten the water and darken the sky. You can adjust the exposure, brightness, contrast, saturation, sharpness, and many other controls by using the local-adjustment brush. Of course you can also paint with this new tool and swipe over a mountain or landscape and make large global adjustments in a few seconds. After you're finished with the brush, a white dot sits on the image in the spot where you performed the adjustment. Hover the cursor over the dot, and slider arrows pop up, allowing you to make further adjustments.
Search is another big area of advancement for Lightroom 2. You can now rapidly search though large numbers of files via keyword and metadata, including date, camera type, lens, country of capture, captions, keywords, and labels.
Integration with Adobe Photoshop CS4 is expanded. Work with a Lightroom image in Photoshop and adjust layers, smart objects, and HDR, and all your changes are updated automatically in Lightroom 2.
Adobe has beefed up the printing options with new commands to print multiple images on one page and even adjust ink and paper type. In printing, you can also set up bleeds and strokes and PPI settings, adding a dash of high-end desktop layout commands for professional use.
Sharpening can be automated now — Lightroom 2 knows when to apply more sharpening when exporting to web galleries or sending to a printer, and you can always override these with your own settings. Speaking of the Web, new web-gallery presets are included for exporting your photo galleries to the Internet. There are some beautiful Flash galleries that smartly prevent your images from being easily downloaded.
File support continues to expand. Lightroom now supports more than 190 file formats. For more compatibility, third-party export and gallery modules are available from various companies. Adobe hosts the Lightroom Exchange website, where you can download modules for free.
Comparing to Adobe Lightroom 2 to Apple Aperture 2 is difficult because the programs are getting so similar. The advance from Aperture 1 to Aperture 2 was a big deal because, frankly, Apple had a lot of catching up to do to get things right. Lightroom had the advantage of public betas, and Lightroom's first version got a lot right, so version 2 mostly represents refinement and the extension of existing features. It's still worth the upgrade price, and even though the interface is far removed from that of CS4, it works beautifully and unobtrusively. (I'd even dare to say that perhaps the Creative Suite programs should follow the direction of Lightroom's interface decision.)
If you're dealing with merely several hundred images, or your creative projects involve photography only on occasion, the Bridge CS4 program that comes bundled with the new version of Photoshop might be robust enough. However, though Bridge does metafilter sorting, labeling, and cataloging, it does not perform touchups and non-destructive changes. If you are looking for more features or you have a mountain of images to track, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 is a professional tool that's up to the task.
bottomline
Company: Adobe
www.adobe.com
Product: Photoshop Lightroom 2
Assets: Simple batch importing; rapid search; automated sharpening; more than 190 file formats supported.
Caveats: Different interface and workflow from CS4 bundle.
Demographic: Digital photography or videography professionals who work with a lot of image files.
PRICE: $299; $99 (UPGRADE)
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