Tastier and more productive. By far.
We have been fans of Lightroom since it came out ,for a lot of reasons, but mainly the way it fit in our workflow.
It was the most natural, integrated, asset management software for photographers.

Like all things, it grew up. The last update gave you additional tools with the global corrections, saving you precious time by not forcing you to leave the Lightroom to work in another program. Even if that program was Photoshop.
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Well the beta of the latest iteration was released a few months ago, and like all good betas, learned from the audience.
As of today, July 29th, you can now buy the latest version of Lightroom 2.0.

Honestly, you will find this iteration so powerful, with essential tools at your fingertips, it just may become the one-stop software for all of your photographic editing needs.

Here are some of the highlights:

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With an improved Library module, we can now work with materials visually over multiple hard drives. And with the quantity of images we shoot, the hard drives are stacking up.

One of our favorite tools-

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Adjustment Brush, is essentially a masking utility, with detailed control.
Above you can see the before, masked element, and the after resulting image.
We had to use that, in the beta version, when we did a magazine cover of a man sitting at his laptop computer with the light of the screen illuminating his face. Used a Micro Lite LED for the main source, but needed some extra punch on the face, and wanted to darken the background. The Adjustment Brush let us “paint” a mask and work with each section separately.
This tool alone will free your mind.

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Taking a simple scenic and adding a graduated filter can mean the difference between, ok, and wow. And its right there in your tool box.

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We use 2 monitors and that was a bit of an issue. It worked fine, but we needed it to work more productively. Spread your work between 2 workspaces, not just one and a full screen image display. trust us, you need this.

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This is not groundbreaking, but essential: you can select your prints to be economically positioned on the paper for printing.
What the heck does that mean ?
Well, this tool will make sure that you are using every inch of paper in the best way, fitting and positioning the prints in all directions to use the page with the least amount of waste. Unfortunately, this sample image doesn’t do the power of this tool justice

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But one thing we have been waiting for is here and easier to use than ever!
Posting to web. Yep you can now post to your Flickr account, if you like. One thing that always was a sore point for us in Lightroom, was this presentation tool. Aperture had it in spades.
We asked for it, they delivered.
Plus of course you can use any number of programs and hosting services but being brought up on iPhoto, simple is good.
What you are looking at in the above image, is a color chart culled from a photograph, which can be used to customize your web pages with a “dropper tool”

And for those who require a profile for your camera for processing RAW images in the most accurate manner, they have expanded their list to make sure that your cameras specs are covered.
Essentially, it allows photographers to see on their computer monitors, what they see on their camera LCDs in essence.
We tweak out the LCD in our DSLR’s and then adjust the monitors accordingly.
Lightroom just saved you a step.
And with the amount of post production photographers do these days, we’ll take all of those steps we can save.

This program is a commitment. Actually, whichever one you choose in this category is a commitment.
Take it for a free test drive, Air it out a bit, upload a couple of CF cards worth. You’ll see after 30 days, why this is a right system.
It probably won’t take 30 days though.
You may have seen the beta, but it’s been polished up quite a bit since then.

Look, love Apple, don’t get the wrong idea. The computers we use have to be MAC.
But Adobe is a company whose entire business is about what you do: images.

It’s $99. for the upgrade and $299. for the full package.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 28th, 2008 at 10:47 pm and is filed under Photo News, Product Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.