Adobe Lightroom Impressions
As an amateur photographer, I’ve managed to collect quite a collection of photos over the last few years. I’ve investigated a number of applications to try to manage the collection, and hadn’t found anything that met my needs. So, my collection of 11,000+ photos was residing in a directory structure on my external hard drive with no way to search them.
Enter Adobe with their new software, Lightroom.
I started using Lightroom back during their beta period last year and was very impressed with its capabilities. The management aspects of the collection are what really drew me to it. I have been able to now go back through my collection and start grouping photos together and tag them with meta data. It has allowed me to find candidates for uploading to iStockPhoto. And it allows me to take a trip down memory lane reviewing the pictures of my kids as they have grown up and changed. However, the performance of the beta left a lot to be desired.
As of February 19, 2007, Adobe released version 1.0 of Lightroom which introduced a number of additional features not previously in the beta and made leaps forward in performance. As the beta expired, I downloaded a copy of the 30 day trial of the 1.0 release and started playing with it.
The v1.0 release was significantly faster than the beta I had previously played with although the conversion process for the database took several hours before I could use it. This is a one time process, however, so it isn’t that big an issue. Once done, the application itself is pretty snappy viewing images in the library with only occasional pauses under normal circumstances. It can still bog down if you are looking at very large collections as it tries to build or retrieve the thumbnails.
The Library mode allows you to see all of the photos in your collection, either all at once, or as collections of images. In the conversion of the beta, it preserved all the collections I had that broke the images down by date taken. This provides a convenient way to look through my large library and not drag the system to its knees.
The editing, or “Develop”, section of the application has been overhauled to include features that were not present in the beta. This includes the ability to over- or under-saturate specific colors in an image by simply clicking and dragging. This makes it very easy to enhance a pale blue sky or make the red stripes on a flag pop. The other options are standard: White Balance, Exposure, Contrast, Brightness, and Saturation. One tool that I found very useful is the Vibrance tool, which allows you to increase the apparent vibrance of an image. It is closely related to the Saturation feature, but provides a different kind of color enhancement.
Over the month that I used the free trial, I found the Lightroom to be a very useful application, both for managing my image library and for making adjustments to photos before posting them online. I found it so useful, that I ponied up $199 (the introductory price) and purchased it from Adobe. Definitely money well spent.
If you’re a photographer like me and are looking for a way to both manage and tweak your images, this is the one stop tool you’ve been looking for.
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