Adobe® Photoshop Lightroom

Adobe[R] Photoshop Lightroom http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/lightroom/ Available for PC and Mac as free Beta software

Adobe has released a preview "build" of Photoshop Lightroom 4 that, according to Adobe, is a new product, built from the ground up for photographers. Adobe also says that the Photoshop Lightroom beta program aims to get direct product feedback so that photographers will have an impact in what Adobe actually ships.

Because Photoshop is a general-purpose graphics application and is used by everyone in the graphics industry from photographers to pre-press experts and because it's not designed specifically for the way a photographer wants to work, there are many features that photographers don't use. Lightroom is an image management/image-processing tool that is designed for the photographer. For example, when returning with memory cards full of images, a photographer would like to go through the images quickly and make basic corrections. In Lightroom, sorting images and applying basic corrections will be much faster because images don't have to be opened and once the corrections are made it will not be necessary to save the image files with the applied corrections.

Lightroom lacks many of Photoshop's editing functions, for example it doesn't have selection tools, so it can't do selective editing which usually requires a masking and painting operation. There are no brushes, clone tools, layers, or text tools in Lightroom but for many photographers Lightroom's digital photography workflow may be better than a combination of Photoshop and Bridge, or Photoshop and the operating system's file manager. Lightroom should handle 80 to 90% of the editing tasks of most photographers and all edits are nondestructive--a real plus.

There are five modules in Lightroom; Library, where images are organized and basic corrections are made; Develop, where more extensive corrections are made; Slide Show, where a group of images can be shown in a slide show; Print, where you can output to your printer in a wide variety of sizes; and Web, where you can output selected images for display on the Internet.

At the current time Adobe has not set a price on Lightroom. It is set to be released for sale in January, 2007. All photographers owe it to themselves to take a look at Lightroom and to give Adobe feedback on features which might need to be improved.

Any mention of products or services in this article or anywhere else in the PSA Journal does not constitute an endorsement or approval of those items.

Stan Ashbrook, FPSA, Review Editor

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