Adobe Lightroom - a photographer's essential (Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.0)

Member Name: alexhaysler

Product:	Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.0
Date:	25/10/09 (11 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: brilliant operating system, easy to use, variety and detail of features

Disadvantages: no direct photo stitching capabilities, no gamma vignette, expensive £££

As a long term Adobe user, I eagerly anticipated the introduction of another photo editing software from them, as Photoshop has been a fantastic tool in my academic career and at my general leisure, helping me to achieve A* at GCSE Art Graphics and A* in Photography.

Adobe have listened to their customers, and created a more photographic orientated system with less gimmicky items and more professional developing options. Used by photographers such as David Molnar, it has many advantages over rival systems such as Gimp and Aperture on Mac. For starters, the attention to detail is brilliant. There is a spot and red eye removal which is essential if you are using a poor quality digital camera, a crop overlay which allow you edit certain parts of the picture without compromising other parts.

It is extremely easy to use, with many tutorials on the internet to help you if you need them and just a general ease of use, even for the most amateur of computer users.

There is also a graduated filter which, with the addition of the vignette tool allows you to create super vignettes, to give a more authentic feel. However, here there is one downfall with Lightroom's vignette system - it is done only on exposure, whereas other systems, such as Aperture use gamma vignette.

There is then the basic features, which allow you to edit Exposure, Recovery, Fill Light and other such things. There is the Tone Curve, allowing you to edit the shadows and highlights of the photo. The different colour editing tools also help in balancing colours, and the detail tool is fairly self explanatory.

The one thing I feel Lightroom is missing is the ability to photostitch to create panoramas, for people who don't want to constantly switch between the two, as i would much rather use just Lightroom from a photo editing perspective. Also, as with all Adobe products, it is £££ and pushes many people to torrenting to save the £200. However, it is a very good buy for the avid photographer who needs that extra something to complete his photographs and make them 'ready for sale'.

Summary: great, but as to be expected from adobe, expensive

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