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- Provides: Image processing
- Format: DVD
- Developer: Adobe
- Minimum Requirements: PowerPC or Intel, Mac OS X v10.4, DVD drive, 1GB hard disk space
- Processor Compatibility: Universal
- Retail Price: $299 new, $99 upgrade
- Availability: Out now
- Version Reviewed: 2.0
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 is best categorized as a Digital Processor. That is, from bringing images to your computer, cataloging them for later retrieval (and, if you want, backing them up to insure protection against accidental loss), enhancing and fine tuning your images, all the way to printing and/or digital distribution—one can do it all from Lightroom. However, one of the strongest reasons to use Lightroom is the opportunity for playing with images with no concern about how many versions and variations of the image you create without screwing up your original image. Any alteration you make on an image in Lightroom is only how Lightroom lets you "see" the image. Nothing is changed in the image itself unless you save a copy with those changes. The biggest negative about Lightroom is that the interface constantly changes, depending upon what you've clicked. This makes "hacking" the program a challenge, and working with Lightroom isn't helped by the manual that doesn't properly explain the conditions where you will see what is being explained. Despite the complex learning curve, there is much to like in Lightroom.
It's important to keep in mind that Lightroom's internal structure is a database
of your images. That is, Lightroom is a DAM, or Digital Asset Manager. You
do not "open" a folder of images; rather, you "import" them
into Lightroom so they can be entered into the database. While the difference
may not be at first apparent, what it means is that after importing a folder
of images, if you then add additional images into that folder via the Finder,
Lightroom doesn't know about those images and will therefore not display them.
You can re-import that folder to see these images, but it also means that you
once you open a Lightroom collection, all work on that collection must be done
within or through Lightroom for Lightroom to know about those images. More
on this later.
In addition to the limitation that you need to avoid adding images to folders in the Finder when using Lightroom, Lightroom can only work with .psd (photoshop documents), .tif (tagged image format), raw (from most camera types), .dng (digital negative), and .jpg (joint photographic group). Any image or document type that isn't amongst that list will neither be seen nor referenced. Thus, if you have (for example) Illustrator (.ai), Acrobat (.pdf), or high dynamic range (.hdr) images in a folder (amongst others), it will be as if the document/image was not in the folder.
Despite these limitations, Lightroom is a very valuable tool for photographers. Keep in mind that despite the fact that photographers do use PDFs, Illustrator, and many HDR images, the vast majority of work by photographers is done with photoshop, raw, DNG, TIF, and JPG files. That's it, so why bother complicating things?
Actually I do have a slight disagreement with this, but I'll dwell on that (including a suggestion) a bit later.
The easiest way to start talking about Lightroom is from the beginning: Again, you do not "open" a folder of images into Lightroom. Rather you "import" the images. During the initial importing process, you also have the chance to set keywords, metadata, and other parameters that let you find that image the next day or the next year. Besides manually importing from the program, you can also set LR to automatically open the Import command when you attach a camera or digital memory card to your compute.
When you import images into Lightroom (either from a digital image card, a folder already on your computer, a CD, or an external drive) the following window appears (shown below). If the images are already on your computer, you can simply add the images to your LR catalog. If they are on a separate drive or card, you can move or copy them to a location of your choice or leave them where they are. Lastly, if they are raw images from the camera, you can convert them into DNGs during the import process. What's more important is that this is a great time to add keywords and custom metadata (e.g., copyright, location, creator, etc.), and if you want, you can also pre-enhance the images by processing the images with pre-made adjustments such as "aged," "Sepia," etc. Note that on the lower left of this window is a checkbox that lets you Preview the images even if they are on a card and have not been imported into the computer yet. This is shown in the bottom image below. One curious option is the ability to pre-set any development setting as you import the images. This is strange because you cannot see how any alteration will look on an image prior to importing. Besides, there are options in Lightroom where you can do the same option and see how the settings will look on your images. So, if you chose to do the alteration at this point, you have to trust what the image will look like. On the other hand, if you do not like the results later on, you can always flip the images back to their default views, such is the power of Lightroom. [Note: the upper image below is at full size, but the lower image was reduced to about half-size to fit this article.]
Much has been said of Lightroom's "working space," and it can be a bit overwhelming at first. Rather than being deluged with many, many palettes (or what are now called "panels" by Adobe), everything is contained within a single window, as shown below. The trickiest part about working with Lightroom is the fact that what you are looking at depends on what you've clicked on. That is, controls that are seen on (say) the left side of the screen in one view do not appear if you click on something else on the right side of the screen. It does work, and it does make sense, but you have to get used to it.
Click on the image for a full size image
There are four primary sections in a Lightroom window; three that you can open or close (or, rather, show or hide), with the exception being the middle region. This is where you do your primary image "looking at" operations, and the left, right, and bottom sides are mostly regions where you select what you want to focus on (in the middle section) or how you want to deal with the middle section. On the left is the primary navigation region where you can either navigate to a specific library or collection or help focus on specific images depending on what you've selected on the right side of Lightroom.
[Terminology is a bit of a challenge here, but a catalogue is the full package of images in your database. A library is a subset of that catalogue. You may have a catalogue of your vacations, and within that are different libraries on the specific locations. Similarly, you may have a different catalogue of your professional work with different libraries of individual shoots. If you want to switch from one catalogue to another, Lightroom will need to (self) quit and restart into the 2nd catalogue. This is not as bad as it sounds, but it is one of several things of which you need to be aware to comfortably work with Lightroom. You cannot open two catalogues at the same time.]
Across the top right side are the five different modes Lightroom offers. The first mode when you start the program or import a new collection of images is the "Library" mode. This is where you initially deal with images. From here, you can sort, create LIbraries, and perform other image organization functions.
On the bottom, one can look at a "filmstrip" view of all of the images in that catalogue or library of images. Below the middle section you can see the various icon tools to view your images (better seen below). On the far left is a grid view to see all of your images as on a light table. To the right of that is a single view to focus on one image. To the right of that is the Compare View option shown with an "X" and "Y" that lets you see closeups of two images (where you can do a "keep and toss" view so that you can process any number of images and narrow down the full selection to whatever number you chose by "keeping or tossing" the images). Lastly is the Survey option—shown below—where you can make as many of the images selected as you wish. When you mouse-over an image, an "X" appears in the bottom right. Clicking on that "X" removes it from the set of selected images (this does not delete it from the computer, the collection, or the library). If you have taken multiple shots of the same subject, working with Survey and the Compare View can be fantastic to whittle the candidates down to the one(s) you want to use.
In addition to these options, there are many other dynamics to view your images, including a second display option that works for second monitors and/or the same monitor as an "overlay" to your main window. Whole articles could be written on how to view your images in Lightroom 2, so forgive me if I'm having trouble focusing on trying to sum this up in a small paragraph). This region also changes depending on what you have selected on the left and/or right side of the image. There are numerous options to set things like ratings or sort order. Because this region tends to change depending on what you are looking at, it can be confusing; at one moment you can change sort order, and another moment you can't because you have left the option to see and access the Sort icon. If there's one area where I find Lightroom frustrating, this is it. When it comes to navigation and/or image arrangement, I do not want to dig or do multiple steps to do something that should be straightforward but isn't because it depends on how I'm looking at the images.
Meanwhile, it's the right side where all of the work (on the images) is done. On the upper right you see five options: Library, Develop, Slideshow, Print, and Web.
The Library is where you can fine-tune any of the metadata and Keywords that you didn't establish when importing the images. This is important when you are importing a bunch of photos of your vacation but a few of the images in your vacation were specifically of Aunt Grazelda. Here, you can select those images of your Aunt and give them the custom keywords that you don't want to give to all of the images of that set. In addition, you can now give any of the images one of the Saved Preset "looks." In the image below, I've set the image to show the regular image on the bottom and a split tone image on the top. [Note: Lightroom can either show complete images top/bottom, left/right or split views of the same image. Also note that the icon tools below the middle region are different from what is shown above—another example of how things change depending on what you've clicked on.] The overall important issue here is that when you set an image with any of the presets, or any of the alterations in Lightroom, none of the alterations are permanent unless you re-save the image with the alteration. This is true with PSDs. JPEGs, TIFFs, or raw/DNG images.
While the presets are somewhat limited, you can create your own. And again, I must point out that nothing you do in Lightroom is permanent—everything you do is only Lightroom's "view" of that image and can be changed, deleted, or altered simply by deleting the changes. If you want to permanently change your pixels, resave the image. If you don't want to make any change permanent but you want to use the change again, create a "Snapshot" of the image by selecting the Snapshot option on the left side when you are in the Develop mode on the right side. You can print, or save any version of a Snapshot. You can open any Snapshot in Photoshop and you will be working with that variation of the image, not the original.
It is the Develop region where you are likely to spend most of your time. There are eight different accordioned regions in the Develop panel. It is both good and bad that you can open more than one at a time. It's good because it can be efficient to have access to (say) the Histogram open at the same time as you have the Tone Curve regions open. It's bad if you want to slip into the Basic region for a quick adjustment, because unless you have one of those 30 inch monitors, chances are you will need to either open and close adjustment types as you work or scroll up and down to the various Develop adjusters. Within this limitation, one of the excellent decisions that the Lightroom engineers made was that as you scroll the various correction adjustments up or down, the Histogram stays in place.
The attributes which make Lightroom significantly better than an image "tweaker" are the various tools just below the word "Histogram," seen above. From the left is the "Crop Overlay," "Spot Removal," "Red Eye Correction," "Graduated Filter," and "Adjustment Brush." Each of these can affect local regions in an image as opposed to global effects such as color correction. That is, if you remove some red eye from an image, the original image still has the red eye even though you will see no red eye within Lightroom. If you save that image out (after correction), that new image will not have red eye because it is a new image saved with the conditions you established.
Another example of why I am impressed and frustrated with Lightroom, consider the Crop Overlay. When you click on this tool, the various crop dynamics are displayed below the tool. [Similar to the Histogram, none of the tools move when you scroll the other correction controls.] When you click on the Crop tool, you will notice faint lines on the image. These are lines for the standard "rule of thirds" (as can be seen below) which are used to place the main focus of your image item along one of those thirds or at an intersection of those thirds. As you change the size of your crop, the overlay lines change as well. This is a wonderful, fantastic tool that is such a pleasure to have as an automatic feature. What is strange is that there are five other overlay options that you can only alter if you press the "O" key (that's the letter "O," not the zero key). If you continue to press the "O" key, you will toggle through five other overlays, specifically "Rule of Thirds," "Golden Ratio," "Diagonal Lines," "Triangles," "Golden mean," and "Grid Pattern." The catch here is that the only way you can access these other overlays is to press the "O" key. There is no right-click or menu option, just tapping the letter "O." In other words, discoverability within Lightroom is an adventure.
There are two tools with Lightroom that are worth the price of admission: the Gradient Overlay and the Adjustment Brush. That's not to belittle the Spot Removal or the Red Eye removal, but they just do not hold a candle to these two.
The Gradient Overlay simply places a gradient overlay perpendicular to where you drag across the image. You can change the length of the gradient depending on how long you drag or the angle. Once you've placed your gradient, you can then play with the full range of alterations as seen below.
As a sample of where you'd use this, in the image above I wanted to have a bit more gradation across the sky. Nothing much, but I felt a subtle change would help the image. On the top image below, you can see the original image, on the bottom you can see the top of two faint lines: the one with a dot in the middle. The dot lies on the mid-point of the gradient. The lower line, which represents the end of the gradient, is at the junction of the sky and the sea and is difficult to see in the image below because of that. Once the gradient is placed, it's not locked in and you can then alter as you need to. You can also add new gradients at any time and/or alter previous gradients. Within the gradient, you can adjust any of the seven dynamics seen in the controllers above.
The Adjustment Brush is similar, but different. In the image above, I wanted to enhance the sand a bit. As seen in the image below, when you select the Adjustment Brush, the available controls are similar to the Gradient controls with the addition of standard brush controls.
I wanted to drop the Exposure and push the Clarity controls. So, I changed the Brush size by tapping the "[" and "]" keys as you would do in Photoshop, and I left the Feather alone. As you can see in the images below, the top image shows the original sand and the lower image shows the altered sand. The important thing here is that with both the Gradient and the Adjustment Brush controls, you can go back and alter any of the controls by selecting any of the adjustment "dots" and adjust away as you need to, or create new adjustments and control them. That is, if I wanted one brush to adjust the sand, I can do that and another brush to adjust the piers' posts, I can do that—and later I can come back and make subsequent adjustments as I so chose. This is fantastic and wonderful control on your images.
Despite all of these options for finessing your images in Lightroom, there are times where you do need to bring out the big guns and open the image in Photoshop. To do this, you simply right (Command)-click on the image and select "Edit in..." and select Photoshop. This now gives you three options as shown below. An interesting thing happens after you make any alterations and do a "Save as..." Because this creates a new image that Lightroom doesn't know about, it will not be known to Lightroom, and if you save it in the same folder where the original image came from, you will need to re-import the folder for Lightroom to access the new image. Fortunately, the first two options alleviate the need to do a Save as because this is a copy to begin with and you do not need to do a "Save as..." [Aren't you glad I saved you several hours trying to figure this out? I wish I had been told this before I started...]
If you do perform a Save as... or otherwise add to a folder after that folder has been imported, you can either re-import that folder or right (Control)-click on a folder that contains the image and select Synchronize folder...
Once you've selected an image to process in Photoshop, the three options shown below pretty much cover all that you can do with that image. [Note: if you have images set to Stack and you have the "Stack with original" checked, then when you create a new image with the copy, it will be placed with the original in a stack.
[Stacks are simple groups of images that you have determined to best be grouped together. For example, if you took a deck of cards and separated them into harts, clubs, diamonds, and clubs so that when you are done, all one would see would be four stacks as opposed to 54 cards. At any time you can select one of those stacks and open it up to see those thirteen cards.]
The issue of Stacks also lets me point out an issue that I feel is surprisingly disappointing about Lightroom's visual feedback for Stacks. In Adobe's Bridge, if you have a stack, the thumbnail's icon has a marker that makes it unique and stands out from the non-stack thumbnails. In Lightroom, I cannot see or distinguish any indication that an image represents a collection of images. As such, unless you know that a Library has stacks, there is no way to know that that collection has more images than observed. While you may know while you are working on a collection of images about any Stacks, if you come back to a Library two years later, will you remember if you had any stacks and know to expand them to see all of the images. With Lightroom, that may be a challenge.
Below is what a Stack looks like in Adobe Bridge. On the left is a stack of three images and on the right is a single, non-stacked image. When you see this, there is no question that something is different from Stacked images to non-stacked image.
Now compare this to a Lightroom Stack. To help distinguish the stack, I've shown the closed stack on the left and an "Expanded" stack on the right. As you can see, there is no visual indication that the single image represents a stack. In addition, in Bridge, I can simply click on the number in the upper left-hand corner to expand that stack to show (in this case) the three images. In Lightroom I am limited to Right (Control)-clicking to expand a single (or all) stacks. I find the implementation of Stacks in Lightroom to be as if none of the engineers knew about what had been done in Bridge.
Continuing on, you now need to show off your images, so the next step is Slideshow to show off your images on your computer. This is pretty straightforward, letting you control how the images are presented, the background, length of time the image is viewed and how long any transition is, if there is any dialog, etc. What is surprising is that the only transition is either nothing or fade. In the grand scheme of things, this doesn't bother me because when looking at images in a slide show, about the only transition I like is a fade. However, I know I'm in a small group on that, and Keynote wouldn't be all of the program it is if there weren't dozens of available transitions. During a slide show, you can apply stars and labels by pressing the keyboard's number keys.
Next is Printing. There are a number of printing templates/layouts that let you print either multiple versions of the same file or multiple images on the same page or multiple pages. The Printing window can be seen below.
Click on the image for a full size image
The screenshot above is a great example of both the range of features and options for printing, but also the potential frustration; specifically, what you see above is only possible on some of the templates, not all. Notice that on the right hand side you can select to print a variety of Page Options. That changes if you select one of the Templates on the top of the selection on the left hand side of Lightroom Templates. If you select one of the top three selected templates, the Page Options aren't available, they're just gone. In addition, there are two types of image printing, Picture Package and Contact Sheet/Grid. If you select Picture Package, the Page Option choices also go away. But, if you are in Contact Sheet/Grid and select one of the first three layouts, they go away. All this wouldn't be so bad except that when you look for how to print page numbers in the manual, no mention is made that you may or may not have access to the Page Options depending on what you've selected. Again, another issue that displays the learning curve for Lightroom. Options changing on you is difficult enough, but they shouldn't be changing within a single boundary. And if they do, the manual should detail those conditions.
Besides the issue mentioned above though, printing is pretty sweet in Lightroom. As you select the various templates, or create new ones, the changes appear in the middle section instantaneously. There is no need to select to render or even wait to render. Once you've created and organized all of your preferences, you can save them for future use.
Next is the option to create layouts for your images to be placed on the web. [Titled "Web" in the process section.] This lets you create photo galleries for the web. There is one html version and sixteen pre-made Flash templates. One of the big benefits of these templates (both html and Flash) over the Web Gallery from Photoshop is that it's possible to add annotations for images. If you have a variety of fields that will always be populated by the same text (e.g., your name, studio, format, etc.) you can save that as a template for future use.
The image below shows the general layout of the Web creation view. Like the Printing module, anything you do is dynamic. So, if you change, add, or subtract images as you work, the changes will be automatically generated. As you add, remove, or change, labels, as you tab or click out of those fields, the changes are automatically (and quickly) changed on the screen. In addition, subtle changes such as the color or shade of any text or objects in a screen can also be adjusted to your needs. This also was a big problem with Web Photo Galleries from Photoshop where each layout was what you got. Alterations and variations were not possible.
Click on the image for a full size image
Lastly, you can export sets directly to a website if it's already set up, avoiding the need to generate the data onto your machine and then subsequently upload the data.
In short, working with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is wonderful, yet very frustrating during the learning phase. One moment you see how to sort the image set you are working with by name or date, and another moment that option is not available. So you have to think back, "What was I doing when I saw Sort and how do I go back to regain access?" There are various options for which there is only one access method (such as the overlay lines when cropping). There are options that are available for some layouts but not others, and these conditions are not addressed in the manual. All in all, this makes the learning and discovery curve for Lightroom longer and more challenging than it should be. On the other hand, I suppose this does make for great opportunities for those who teach and/or write books about Lightroom so perhaps it's a Make-Work decision.
Another complaint about Lightroom is that it only sees PSD, JPG, DNG, RAW, and TIF images. I'm willing to accept those images as the only image types that I can access in lightroom, but I'd also like to be able to identify other kind of image/document types contained in a folder. Thus, a request/suggestion: if I create an HDR (High Dynamic Range) image in Photoshop or Photomatix and it's placed in a folder that I'm viewing in Lightroom, I'd like a place-holder icon be placed in Lightroom so that I can access that and open it in Photoshop or Photomatix. To help avoid clutter, I'd also like to see a preference that lets me select image types that I will get place-holder icons. Thus, I might want to get place-holders for .HDR, but not for .GIF images. There's no reason to have full images in Lightroom since I cannot process those images, but since I can create, say, HDR images from images seen in Lightroom, let me at least see the results/creation of that product.
Despite my complaints, this is a very strong product only made better with this second release. If you take photographs and want to create alternate versions of images, track images, maintain control of image sets, and follow the images from initial download through image correction, viewing, printing, and posting on the web, enjoy working with Lightroom. However, get ready to purchase a book or two and start looking for tutorials on the web.
___________ Gary Coyne has been a scientific glassblower for over 30 years. He's been using Macs since 1985 (his first was a fat Mac) and has been writing reviews of Mac software and hardware since 1995.
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