Wired's First Look at Photoshop Lightroom

[Suhit Gupta]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.wired.com/news/culture/reviews/0,72787-0.html?tw=rss.index' target='_blank'>http://www.wired.com/news/culture/reviews/0,72787-0.html?tw=rss.index</a><br /><br /></div><i>"Digital imaging software traditionally falls into two categories: applications for cataloging and organizing your photos and more powerful applications for editing individual images. Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 1.0, released this week after a year in beta development, straddles these two categories. In fact, it is part of a new breed of pro-sumer application -- RAW workflow software. Photographers use the RAW file format to capture image data in its purest, least processed form. Most consumer cameras compress or slightly tweak a photo as soon as it's shot, and RAW skips this step. The file sizes of RAW images are larger and the photos don't look as "finished," but working with RAW files also offers more control over the final product. Needless to say, RAW appeals to professionals and photo geeks, but hardly anyone else."</i><br /><br /><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/lightroom2.jpg" /><br /><br />So everyone's (or at least mine :)) first question when looking at this software is if this is a Photoshop killer and it makes sense that Adobe would not make software that competes with one of its flagships. Lightroom is aimed squarely at users of the RAW file format. While Lightroom can handle other formats, it's probably overkill for the casual user. Lightroom costs $300, but Adobe is offering an introductory price of $200 through April 30, 2007.

[Vincent Ferrari]

After using LR extensively in the beta and after its release, I can tell you it does actually replace Photoshop for a good number of the people who use it. You can do lots of correction including some touchup work right in LightRoom and that, by itself, means most people won't have to load Photoshop for every little tweak and touchup.

I like it. I've recommended it to people, and the performance is spectacular even on slower machines.

I definitely agree with the fact that it's overkill for most consumers, but then again, isn't Photoshop also? ;-)

[Gordo]

I am part way through my trial period, and I plan to purchase the product. I do not have Photoshop, but do use Elements. This product was perfectly positioned for my needs:
- just starting to convert to RAW
- looking for an organization/phot browsing functionality

I will continue to use elements for editing where more work is required, but basic adjustments, croping, saving for web all work nicely in Lightroom.

[marlof]

I have Photoshop CS2, but since I started using Lightroom, it hardly ever gets use (and nor does iView Media Pro, soon te be rereleased as Microsoft Expression Media). I don't like too much retouching in my images, and for me the tools in Lightroom are almost sufficient. I'd just need a somewhat better noise and sharpening tool, so until that's available (I suspect plugins from the likes of Noise Ninja, Noiseware, Neat Image and Pixel Genius will become available now the SDK is released) I'll use other software next to Lightroom as well. For my modest cataloguing, Lightroom is sufficient, although if I'd have to deal with clients and subsets and what not, I'd continue to use iView Media Pro or something like that.

[bmhome1]

LightRoom is wonderful to experience handling RAW images and the interface is spectacular (setup for medium grey window fills then select "lights dim" view) to see how an image really should be displayed for color adjustment without backround color bias.

Its fast, even on my 1Gz tablet running Vista, BUT it makes 200MB caches of 3GB folders as Library to accelerate RAW image rendering and archive adjustments for reuse. There-in lies its problem; using LightRoom as archive creates HUGE databases for the Library and quickly slows performance overall for ALL hardware, regardless of power using LightRoom.

I'm discarding the cache (RAW settings can be exported) after processing folder as used. Reloading folder again later takes the several minutes to render as originally, but image processing speed won't slow.

For modest hardware running LightRoom its an important issue to consider and stay ahead of as Library size blooms with use.

[Neil Enns]

I've been using Lightroom extensively since Beta 3 and love it, but I still wind up using Photoshop for every print I make. Here's what's missing in Lightroom for me:

1) Ability to sharpen with 3rd party tools (PhotoKit Sharpener anyone? Although, Jeff Schewe literally just hinted in the Luminous Landscape tutorial that I'm watching that it's coming soon!)
2) Ability to do noise removal (NoiseNinja, I still do this in the standalone app)
3) Soft proofing
4) Local changes (brightness, contrast, levels, etc, that are only applied to part of the image with masks)
5) Ability to do all their cool print layout stuff, but save as a tiff for printing at a real lab rather than desktop printer

Of course, I *love* the global adjustments in Lightroom. The curves tool alone is mindboggling easy to use. And the raw processing is killer. And the library management stuff is very nice as well.

Neil