Adobe has released a major upgrade to its already pretty great digital photo library program, Lightroom. The 2.0 upgrade, available for $99 at Adobe’s site, greatly bolsters Lightroom’s image manipulation capabilities so you’ll need Photoshop even less. In fact, it seems like Lightroom can do almost everything you’d want to do to a picture to improve the image quality. You still need Photoshop to make alterations — cutting and pasting the dog’s head onto Aunt Marge’s body, for example. And Lightroom plugin wunderkind Jeffrey Friedl has updated all his great export additions to work with 2.0, too.
I’m just getting started exploring Lightroom 2.0. I have over 8,000 pictures in my Lightroom 1.4.1 library. So I’m going to start slowly because the program can, in theory, do far more damage to my library of previously “fixed” photos than more old-fashioned software like Apple’s iPhoto. How can that be?
In Lightroom, the program doesn’t actually alter your digital photo files when you make changes. Instead, it keeps track of which adjustments to apply to each picture in a separate database. Only when you go to print or export a photo does Lightroom impress those changes onto a file, and it still keeps the original pristine. In iPhoto and other programs, when you make a change — say to decrease the exposure and darken an overexposed shot — the original file is forever altered and imprinted with the change. Lightroom’s non-destructive editing, by contrast, means you preserve all your digital files as originally shot.
But the downside is that all your improvements only exist in Lightroom’s database. If the database goes wacko, you’re left with just your originals. So that makes me a little wary of jumping into Lightroom 2.0 whole hog a day after it’s released.
A couple of the new features I’m looking forward to using:
-Getting the most press so far is the adjustments brush. This allows you to make adjustments to only one part of a photo, a part you select Photoshop-style by painting it with the adjustment brush.
-The volume browser eases the job of sorting and organizing where digital photo files actually live on your hard drive. As I have been slowly integrating my old iPhoto collection into Lightroom over the past year, I’ve sometimes gone a little crazy trying to sort everything just as I want it. Just importing files into Lightroom’s library doesn’t move them anywhere.
-Improvements to printing, including an automatic sharpening effect that’s selected based o how you’ve chosen to print.
Elsewhere around the web, Photoshop guru Scott Kelby compares the new features in Lightroom 2.0 to his “wish list.” Rick LePage talks about his five favorite new features over at Macworld. And the Photo Darkroom web site has a quite lengthy discussion of practically every change in the update. And, of course, here’s Adobe’s official blog post of what’s new.
I’ll report back with more once I’ve played around with the update more.
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