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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.
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 allows you to select a group of photos to compare. At left is the new folders section, which arranges your images via folders, subfolders, and hard drives, both offline and online.
Adobe continues to improve its flagship workflow program for digital photography. Photoshop Lightroom 2 is designed to make it easy to sort, manipulate, and store thousands of images. The program features a completely different workflow and interface from the familiar Creative Suite 4 (CS4), but it works nicely and feels natural. It's very easy to get up to speed with the program in just a few minutes. This is a good thing — the last thing you need is a steep learning curve merely to work with photos. The new version of the program is not exactly brimming with new features and modes, but it includes enough refinements and additions to make it well worth considering the upgrade.
One of the best features of Lightroom 2 is that everything is non-destructible. Changes such as touchups are stored merely as metadata instructions; the original files are never touched or saved over. Another advantage is the program merely points to the images to build the galleries, so you don't have to copy them over to another database. This is especially handy if you have a lot of images on external drives or in multiple locations. Enhancing that effort, Adobe has improved drive management for Lightroom 2. The program now lists the images by their drive locations.
Also new: Lightroom 2 caches high-resolution previews, so even if one of your hard drives is offline, you can still sort and manage the images that live on another drive.
When you import digital image files into Lightroom 2, you can set them up in folders, and in subfolders for even more fine-grain management. All the advancements I've listed so far sound simple, but they offer a lot of power. After all, you'll often want to figure out quickly the specific location of any of your thousands of pictures.
Lightroom 2 can batch-process images during import. Imagine importing a whole folder of files, automatically renaming them all, sending them to specific folders, and applying preset image-manipulation commands to them. Of course, batch-processing isn't just for import. Lightroom 2 can apply just about any tweak or touchup to hundreds or thousands of files at a time. Say you shot several memory cards worth of outdoor images and the white balance was off — a little too blue. Simply tweak one of the images then apply that tweak to all the others with one click.
Lightroom 2's dual-monitor support allows the program to display the interface on one monitor and full high-res images on the other. Recently, I swung one monitor toward a client so he could view single images. Meanwhile, I sat behind the other, sorting through a shoot and doing basic touchups on the fly. You can also send multiple pictures to the second monitor now. This way, a client can see the before and after or choose the best image among three contenders.
The second monitor has a very nice Loupe mode. This digital version of the classic photographer's magnifier lets you zoom into a full-screen image (by holding down the mouse button) and move the image around. Releasing the mouse button snaps it back to 100-percent view. If you don't have a second monitor, you can still use the dual-monitor feature. The program pops up the second screen as a separate window, allowing new arrangement options for viewing.
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