Adobe Lightroom: Digital Developing for Professional Photographers

The best way to create a quality product is to ask the experts, and that is exactly what Adobe did when they created Photoshop Lightroom. They turned to professional photographers for their wishlists for photo management and output. The result is an incredibly well-designed program that will do far more than the average amateur photographer will need.

Photoshop and Lightroom

Although this program has Adobe Photoshop in the name, it is not a different version of Photoshop. It's a separate product with a different function. Photoshop is a terrific graphics application which is used by professionals in many artistic fields, but it isn't designed for the specific things that photographers want to do with images. Lightroom was created to simplify the workflow from the camera to the finished product. The Adobe website defines the difference between the two in this way: "New Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is the perfect complement to Adobe Photoshop. Use Lightroom to import, manage, adjust, and present large volumes of digital photographs, and use Photoshop to more thoroughly refine individual images."

Batch Editing
Most photo software packages are either used to organize photos or to edit them, but very few do both well, which Lightroom does. Lightroom is designed to handle many images at once. One nice feature is that you can edit a batch of photos at the same time. If, for example, you shot fifty photos outside on a cloudy day, you can alter one photo and then copy those changes to the other photos as well. You can also add a watermark to all of your photos at the same time.

RAW and other formats

Lightroom accepts RAW formats, which can differ from one camera to the next, as well as other common formats. Amateur photographers are often unfamiliar with RAW format, and prefer to use the camera's automatic editing functions to create .jpgs or other such formats. There is nothing wrong with this; after all, that's why digital cameras include those functions. However, serious photographers know that RAW format allows them to make more improvements and changes than other formats. While you edit your photos in Lightroom, no matter what format they are in, no changes are made to the original image, and you always have a history available to see what changes you have made.

Five Modules

There are five ‘modules' in Lightroom: Library, Develop, Slideshow, Print and Web. Library is the module for importing and organizing your images. In the Develop module, you can adjust your images, using slider bars to change the brightness, clarity, fill light, etc. The remaining three modules prepare your images to be shared via a slideshow, a print or a web photo gallery. You can easily switch from one module to another by simply clicking on the appropriate word in the top right corner. As you switch back and forth between images and modules, Lightroom remembers your changes automatically.

Ease of Use and Installation

Lightroom is very easy to install and use. You can download a free 30-day full-function trial version from the Adobe website, which I would recommend doing before you decide to purchase. The installation is simple, and once the program is installed you can watch a tutorial to show you how to use the software. The Adobe website has numerous tutorials and plenty of documentation to help you learn the ins and outs.

I was really impressed with the capabilities of this software, and in this review I have only skimmed the surface of what it can do. As impressed as I was, I won't be buying this product, because the capabilities are far beyond what I need to do. The price of $299 seems hard to justify for me and my limited photography skills. That said, I would think that if I were a professional photographer, I would consider this a useful and possibly necessary tool, especially if I were already using Photoshop.