Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.0, Full Version (PC/Mac) (CD-ROM)

A Great Addition To A Photographer's Arsenal As photography and digital images become more complex (RAW and high dynamic range for example), software will have to be developed to assist in the work flow, and to provide tools that will allow users to exploit the full benefits on offer. In a perfect world this could be done in as little time as possible without having to slave over images, and allowing photographers to spend more time behind the lens instead of in front of the computer screen. And so Lightroom 2 is born, software from Adobe that claims to be essential for today's digital photography work flow, allowing you to import, process, manage and show your images. The first edition of Lightroom was popular, and rivaled Apple's Aperture software. So this second version is a welcome addition to the Adobe family. New editing features have been added, so you can now make adjustments and touch ups in Lightroom itself, without having to switch between programs. These include an adjustment brush, and a graduated filter tool, that's excellent for compensating under or overexposed parts of a photograph. Improved printing facilities that let you print out on to templates or custom sheets. Images can be sharpened automatically, and to an exacting standard, saving time especially if you have a lot of photos to work on. Also included are improved dodging and burning tools, as well as comparison options for different settings. 64-bit support for both Windows and Mac has also been included. A welcome improvement, is the introduction of 'smart' metatags, providing you with a means for organising all of your photographs with keywords and category's that actual work, that even let you organize data over several physical drives. Adobe Lightroom 2 even gives you the ability to show off your images online in web galleries. Dual monitor support has been added, it allows you to have what you are working on split between the two. Useful if you are discuss various shots with a client. The software interface isn't too different from from the previous versions, so existing user's will have have little trouble upgrading to this version, while at the same time new users will appreciate the uncluttered and easy to learn interface. The organizational facilities are excellent. Prior to using this software I had hundreds of images in dozens of folders, that were then themselves in folders, then backed up, however now after spending some time in Lightroom, all of my images are now easy to find and to both use and update. A very useful feature is the ability to Merge to HDR and Merge to Panorama, allowing you to work with and process multiple images faster and easily than Photoshop itself. Adobe Lightroom does not change your original photo, it will leave it untouched (meaning you no longer have to make copies of your originals and keep them separate,) applying any changes you make to data file. This also means that you can step backwards undoing multiple changes that you've made, with out having to start over again. The software does have a few minor problems. I would say that the documentation is hopeless, but I can't even say that - simply because there was none at all. But there are plenty of free online video tutorials just a mouse click away. The software is resource hungry, you will not be able to run Lightroom 2 very well on a low end computer, without having to wait for seconds at a time between changes. It's also noticeably slower than Adobe Photoshop at opening very large files. But apart from that, Lightroom makes processing photos faster and easier. Anybody who has tried to work with a large batch of RAW files, will know it can quickly become repetitive, but Lightroom does 'lighten' the load. No one photo package of any nature nature can do absolutely everything and this package is no exception. While it does offer some good and genuinely useful tools, as a standalone product it can't do everything. It would therefore be better when backed up by a more comprehensive package such as Adobe Photoshop, which would provide you with additional tools and facilities, in case you do need them.

Still great, but not that much better than Lightroom 1 Whatever bugs they had in Lightroom 2, they seem to have fixed in the 2.1 patch. I've been using the free 2.1 trial for a month and it's a joy to use, so much so that after writing this review I'm off to order the full copy by post from Amazon, because the digital download from Adobe is £40 more expensive ! I can't see that much difference from version 1, but there again I haven't gone through all the video tutorials that Adobe have up on their site. For a digital SLR user, I just can't do without it, it's that good.

An significant upgrade to a great application Ideal for anyone with an expensive camera, image management software Photoshop Lightroom 1.0 was a great image editing and processing application. Now Lightroom 2.0 has arrived. Lightroom is kind of a batch processing application where it uploads photos from your camera card, tags and sorts them, and then allows image editing [cropping, enhancement, optimisation] before exporting them to disk, printer or web/email. It has a powerful set of editing tools built in and almost removes the need for a separate image editor like Photoshop CS4. You can download a 30 day trial from Adobe to see if it meets your requirements or whether budget consumer Adobe Photoshop Elements 7.0 or the fantastically expensive Adobe PhotoShop CS4 is more suitable for your needs. Lightroom 2.0 even integrate into PhotoShop CS4 if you are lucky enough to own it, and passsing images to it no longer requires export as TIFF or PSD files. Lightroom 2.0 is an ideal application if you have to shoot loads of photos one minute and pass them on to visitors the next, or you simply want to minimise image editing time on the PC and get out there again with your camera. The only downside is that the full version price of Lightroom 2.0 has jumped up to £230, although that makes the far cheaper upgrade price seem better value if you already own Lightroom 1.0, particularly as this is a worthwhile upgrade. The most obvious change in Lightroom 2.0 are dual monitor support, more options for localized image processing/editing, an ability to take 3rd-party plug-ins, better 'removable drive' handling and the 'smart collections' image database tool. There's now an Adjustment Brush and a Graduated Filter that can apply affects within the image rather than just globally as before, e.g. for doing things like softening skin on faces and darkening & colouring skies respectively. There's a new [search] Filter Bar and the Library Module has been redesigned and offers more image information [for image selection]. There's a new picture package layout engine for printing multiple copies of photos, offering 16-bit printing and adaptive output sharpening can be applied to the print output based on image resolution. In addition Lightroom 2.0 now has 64-bit Vista and Mac OS 10.5 support. Be warned though the application layout has changed and you need Adobe's latest update patches and a modern fast multi-core Intel graphics workstation PC to get Darkroom running smoothly [which I have - and I get no crashes under XP Pro]. Plus I don't care for the trendy charcoal gray interface, text has been black on white since the written word was invented millennia ago for a good reason, and classic XP/Vista window colour schemes and layout are simply more practical during use. It does help you concentrate on the image though I suppose, and it recreates that vintage darkroom feel [where you can't see squat else]. Still that's a minor quibble given the merits of the application. School kids, college students and departments will qualify for significant educational discounts on all Adobe's software, so check these out if that includes you. Visit Adobe for further details of the software & educational discounts. PC system requirements are an Intel Pentium 4, XP or Vista Premium, 1Gb system RAM, 1GB hard-disk space and a 1,024x768 display. The fact that AMD processors aren't mentioned might be significant. Adobe installers often reject any PC that falls below the minimum spec, plus 4Gb system memory, a ~3GHz multi-core CPU and a fast graphics card will certainly speed things up. To quote Adobe: "The new Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 is the serious photographer's essential toolbox, providing one easy application for managing, adjusting, and presenting large volumes of digital photographs so you can spend less time in front of the computer and more time behind the lens."

Perfect work-flow tool Running on WinXP (2gb mem, 3.2GHz CPU), yes it can be slow at times, this has been acknowledged by Adobe, performance should be addressed in the next patch 2.1. So suggest if you're thinking about buying this, see what patches have happened since these reviews. I haven't used LR 1.4 unlike other reviewers, so can only comment based on LR2; for those users who prefer to spend time behind the camera and not a PC, this is the app. Easy to use workflow tool with many features, good selection of image enhancement tools, the Grad Filters are superb, allows open-source plugins (for example plugin tools available to auto upload images to your favourite online sites etc). For the money I would liked to have seen some paper documentation with this, as a minimum a quick start guide offering hints & tips on how to best organise you images should be included. I've already setup catalogues and stored images that I know I could have distributed better now I've been using LR for a few weeks now. As a neutral who was looking for an application that would allow me to swiftly process 400+ RAW shots with minor tweaking (batch adjust white balance, cropping, saturation, sharpening etc) I have found this fits the bill. Other than Aperture (only for the Apple), there is no alternative work-flow tool as good at the moment.

I think Lightroom 2 is wonderful I'm sure I agree with some of the comments already posted on this product, such as relocation of some of the tools (which is annoying for the first 30 mins unti you get used to it), but the improvements are well worth the upgrade. I didn't notice some of the missing features of earlier versions so I'm not sure I'd used them that much - you may or may not yourself. It can be a little clunky if your PC spec is a tad on the low side, and getting used to the new features such as graduated filter can take just a little getting used to. After v2 I'm not going back to v1.x, its great :)