Adobe Lightroom 1.0
There was some discussion on Sayonara’s blog some time ago about the merits of processing RAW photos using Aperture vs. Lightroom. At the time, having looked at the early beta, I wasn’t impressed with the layout nor tools available. Generally I thought organisation was very clumsy, and it was a bit too clunky for my liking.
Adobe released the final version of Lightroom a few days ago and I’ve been trying it out.
After using a copy of it for a few hours, I have to say I’m rather impressed with the final version. Organisation of photos is much better: it now uses a folders system which is kept in check with the filesystem. The interface, whilst not perfect, is far more polished, and the speed of the application is much better, even on my laptop with limited RAM.
Previewing both RAW and JPEG thumbnails is quite slow at the moment; I would have thought that it would be reasonably simple to extract the thumbnails from EXIF, but apparently it generates them on-the-fly. Again, zooming to 1:1 is quite slow (2-3 seconds), but this is to be expected.
Control over white-balance and other RAW settings is handled by Photoshop’s Camera Raw 4.0 in a different interface. It’s quite smooth and results are nice to see. There’s some minimal post-processing options, but essentially you’re expected to have a copy of Photoshop installed for any serious retouching (although this is not required).
There’s a vast array of useful features which I simply hadn’t noted before. As mentioned previously, I like to work with DNG as it’s future-proof and preserves all of my EXIF data. Lightroom (through the included Photo Downloader applet) automatically detects inserted photo cards, and can be set up to convert the photos to DNG, organising them in a variety of useful ways.
Generally the entire experience was completely painless. It’s going to replace a lot of my workflow now, as everything I want can be done by Lightroom and Photoshop. This “review” is quite short, but I encourage you to go and download the beta and give it a shot. It’s really very good!
19/9/2007 9:49 pm
Traitor.
Is this “good”, or “good compared to the alpha version”?
19/9/2007 9:58 pm
I’d say “good”. There’s been some quite significant improvements over the beta in terms of organization and the like. It’s going to replace Downloader Pro/BreezeBrowser Pro as my tool for organizing photos, and since I don’t do a whole load of editing in PS anyway (mainly just RAW settings nowadays) it will probably save me a heap of time.