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Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2

From: Adobe

List Price: ~~$299.00~~
Buy New: $217.95
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Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

28 reviews
Sales Rank: 11

Format: Cd-rom
Platforms: Mac Os X Leopard, Mac Os X Intel, Windows Vista, Windows Xp
Media: CD-ROM
Edition: Full
Autographed: No
Memorabilia: No
Operating System: Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.7 x 1.9

MPN: ADBCD15439WM
Model: 65007312
UPC: 883919154398
EAN: 0883919154398
ASIN: B0018VH8S2

Release Date: August 15, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Condition: Brand New & Factory Sealed! Free USPS Delivery Confirmation!

Features:

•	Enhance specific areas of a photo, or precisely adjust overall color, exposure, and tonal range nondestructively
•	Automatically import, rename, and sort your entire shoot; find your photos quickly with powerful yet flexible sorting, selecting, and organizational tools
•	Present your work in dynamic slide shows, interactive web galleries, and a variety of flexible print templates; easily upload your photos to popular online photo-sharing sites
•	Configure your workspace to manage image workflow and presentation more efficiently thanks to support for multiple monitors
•	Every change you make to an image is automatically tracked, so you can return to any state with a single click

Who's It For?

Professional photographers
Photographers who shoot large volumes of images in every specialty, from fashion and fine art to portraiture and photojournalism.

Advanced amateur photographers
Photographers who don't earn a living from their images but have a deep passion for photography; take large numbers of photos, typically with a digital SLR camera; and value professional tools and results.

Educators
University and community college instructors who are shooters themselves and who teach the best tools and practices to the next generation of photographers.

The top reasons to buy Adobe Photoshop Lightroom

Enhance specific areas of a photo
Enjoy more flexible, accurate enhancements by targeting a specific area for dodging and burning.

Quickly find any photo
Sort and filter large volumes of photos using powerful metadata filters to quickly find just the photo you want.

Automatically import and process your way
Import and process large volumes of photos according to your customized settings. Rename files, organize them into folders, add metadata, and convert file formats for an entire shoot simultaneously.

Native 64-bit architecture
Utilize the advanced memory-handling capabilities on the latest Mac OS and Windows systems.

Work smoothly with Adobe Photoshop software (sold separately)
Enjoy tight integration with Adobe Photoshop software for streamlined use of Smart Objects, panorama stitching, high dynamic range (HDR) functionality, multiple layer workflow, and more. See your edits automatically updated in Lightroom.

Multiple monitor support
Add a second monitor and enjoy more room to work. Support for multiple monitors allows you to configure your workspace to manage image workflow and presentation more efficiently.

Be productive quickly
Ease your learning curve with task-oriented modules that speed you through typical workflow tasks by placing just the tools you need at your fingertips.

Edit nondestructively
Enjoy robust support for more than 190 camera raw file formats, and experiment with confidence. Adjustments you make to images in Lightroom won't alter the original data, whether you're working on a JPEG, TIFF, DNG, or camera raw file.

Easily show off your photos online
Create dynamic web galleries based on Adobe Flash technology without programming. In a few clicks, you can assemble and upload an interactive gallery to your website. Or easily upload your images to popular photo-sharing sites directly from Lightroom.

Customer Reviews: Read 23 more reviews...

5 out of 5 stars

Full Featured Workflow September 27, 2008
J. Won (United States)
35 out of 35 found this review helpful

I am not a professional but I have alot of photos I need to keep organized. I used iPhoto, but between it and Photoshop, there were some steps that just slowed down the process. Basically Lightroom is a combination of an organizational application with basic photo editing capabilities. It integrates well with Photoshop for more advanced editing. For my family snapshots though I rarely have to edit outside of Lightroom.

Navigating:
==========
Basic key commands:
G - Grid view, thumbnails of your photos
E - Loupe, highlighted photo fullscreen
D - Single photo in Develop mode
C - Compare, see two photos side by side, nice when you are looking for the perfect shot.
Command+Option+5 - Web module, I use this frequently to upload behind my site, via Lightroom's ftp upload option.
Command [ or ] - rotates image CW and CCW

Organization:
==========
I am an organization obsessive, especially about my family photos. I have all of my photos on an external drive and LR is pointed to them. There are basically two types of "folders" in LR Folders and Collections.

-Folders
are just that, they refer to the physical folders/subfolders on your hard-drive and reflect the same structure in LR. If you have a folder named 2008>January>01 on your hard-drive, it will be so within LR. When you import into LR you can choose to 1. add photos without moving. 2. copy them to a new location. or 3. move them to a new location.

-Collections
are "virtual folders" within LR and these actually do not move the photo physically on your hard-drive. This is nice because you may have some photos you want to print, you just drag the thumbnails into a collection folder and you don't have to worry about it floating around somewhere on your computer. (when you actually delete a photo in LR it gives you the option of removing from Lightroom only or remove it from completely from your hard-drive) A new feature of LR 2 is the addition of smart collections. There are many options of smart collections, I use them to collect top rated photos. Here is how. You add a new smart collection which takes you into a little sub menu, where you can set how this folder collects photos. I have one called "top rated" which any photo from my folders rated 4 or 5 stars goes into this collection. So where you can drag and drop your favorite photos into collections you can also set these parameters and LR will do the organization for you. Love this feature. You can set smart folders my rating (0-5 stars) color label, dates... and a couple more options I haven't explored yet. As you can imagine there are countless different ways of making these...

-Importing
I basically plug my memory card into my computer and LR asks if I want to import. I have it set to create a physical folder on my hard-drive and import there. So my photos are organized on import. At this time there are options of renaming the whole set of photos with a custom name for example "las vegas 2008 vacation_etc......jpg"

Editing:
==========
This is basically the photoshop part of Lightroom, you have basic editing tools in the Loupe (E) but you need to go to Develop Mode/Module (D) for more advanced editing. You basically have control of color in LR, for example, white balance, hue, temperature, tint, brightness, saturation, curve...etc There is also allowances for Lens correction, noise reduction, sharpening, etc. You can do cropping in develop mode as well, which is very simple.

A couple of new tools in LR 2.0, I have only started to play around with are Spot Removal and Adjustment Brush. Spot removal tool comes up like the stamp tool in photoshop, where if you have a spot of dust or a pixel you want to get rid of. This is a two step tool, where you first choose the spot you want to remove, (say a dark spot on someone's cheek) next you choose the area of the photo you want to replace the spot with (a clean area of the person's cheek) and voila the spot is gone. The adjustment brush is nice to have because you can overexpose, underexpose, adjust the contrast, brightness, saturation with a brush tool. This is something I didn't expect out of LR so I will definitely be exploring this tool.

You can also edit in Photoshop pretty seamlessly out of LR. You can edit the original (100.jpg will be the one you will be editing in PS) and see the effects back in LR. Edit a copy in PS (100-edit.jpg will be created in your hard-drive and see it next to the original in LR. Also Edit in PS with LR adjustments, any edits in LR will be exported out into PS.

One thing to keep in mind is that any edit done in LR are NOT HARD EDITS. Meaning, you do not affect the original image until you export that image out of LR. The edits are stored in LR until you do an export out into PS or into a folder on your desktop. Until then all photos can be restored back to their original state.

-Presets:
This is a fun part of LR. Lightroom comes already with some basic presets, which instead of remembering all the steps you took to edit one photo, you can save these steps into "presets". So in Develop mode you adjust the, hue, curve, temperature, detail, saturation..etc. of a photo, and you can save it as a preset, call it "preset outdoor" or something and then you can apply this preset to one or dozens of photos at once. Voila. There are lots of free presets already out there. (do a google search. the flickr lightroom group is a good source for learning) You can also cut and paste the edits of a particular photo and paste in onto a group of photos as well.

Web Module:
==========
This is also fun too. Basically you enter in your web ftp info into LR and tell it to point to a subfolder on your site. (www.website.com/gallery1) and this is where you upload the galleries too. LR comes with a few prepackaged galleries and flash galleries, you select your photos, choose the web template, edit the template (background color, type etc. and upload. and it's really that simple you have uploaded a gallery behind your site. Obviously you need to learn the basics, but before I had to upload with a ftp client, create the html etc.

All in all, Lightroom really is a fantastic tool. I am still learning alot about it. And I know there are people who prefer Aperture and I will try it out to compare, but LR just felt right for me. Try out the 30 day free trial, test out as much as you can, It is not a cheap program but if you are as excited about this stuff it really is a great tool. Cheers.

4 out of 5 stars

Review for complete novices: From a complete novice. August 19, 2008
btb_anon (Silicon Valley, CA United States)
29 out of 33 found this review helpful

OK this review won't be for everyone but...
Install onto vista was easy and pain free. Once installed it took only a couple of hours to start making some worthwhile use of the product in processing and improving my raw format photos. So the product is well written and mostly easy to use and to understand.

But some of the interface seems quirky: For instance when labeling a photo there are quick keys ALT+ (1-9) to add keywords from a list without having to retype them every time. But if you chose a photo and then type the ALT 1 too quickly it doesn't work, instead trying to remove the keyword. There may be some sane reason for this behavior, but it is far from intuitive. Also selecting multiple photos then pressing Alt 1 did not label them all with that keyword.

The lack of any paper documentation for a product costing $250 ish is a let down, especially since being new the third party text books are still a few months away from being published.

So I'll give it 4 stars for now. Noting that this is not from the prospective of someone who used lightroom 1.

OK, been using it for a while. Interface still seems a little less than perfect, but it does the job well enough. Connecting to photoshop is pretty easy but seems slow (I have CS, so CS3 might connect much better). The RAW processing is great and an absolute requirement with my older version photoshop which didn't support my camera's raws. I still think 4 stars is fair. Though I finally got how to add a keyword to a group of photos. You must select the photos from within the 'grid view' and not from the scrollable list of images at the bottom of the page.

5 out of 5 stars

Weird, Wild and Wonderful October 15, 2008
Alexandra Bailee (Tucson, AZ)
20 out of 20 found this review helpful

This is the story of three bears. Papa Bear, AKA Photoshop, Mama Bear, AKA Lightroom, and Baby Bear, AKA Bridge. Papa Bear carries the weight and does the heavy lifting. Mama Bear organizes everything and gets lots of important work done behind the scenes. Baby Bear is smaller, but still important to the family. Together, the three bears are a powerful family, especially to the photographers who revere and adore them.

Okay, lets kick the bear metaphor to the curb and take a look at this marvelous thing we call Lightroom 2. Who needs it? You do, if you are an enthusiast amateur or professional photographer. You need it if you take hundreds of photos every week and you have thousands of photos in your archives. You need it if you shoot events--reunions, weddings, mitzvahs, company events--and you have to output hundreds of photos in a relatively short time. Lightroom is that part of your workflow.

The moment you pop the installation DVD into your computer, you'll want to start playing with your photos. Resist the temptation. Take a few minutes to personalize the interface by customizing the Identity Plate and Module picker. You can also set up the Panel End Marks and image background. (This is especially handy if you occasionally have clients looking over your shoulder.) Don't forget to set up the interface preferences to suit your style.

Lightroom is a collection of five specific modules: Library, Develop, Slideshow, Print and Web.

The process begins by importing photos into the Lightroom 2 Library. You'll recognize a process similar to bridge. You'll add keywords and import your photos. There are Grid and Loupe views. You can compare two photos or view multiple photos. In the greater scheme of things, you'll create catalogs of large collections of your photos.

One of the features which is often underutilized but wonderfully helpful is the rating system. You have the option to sort your photos by giving them a 0-5 star rating. You can also add more specific keywords to individual photos or specific groups of photos. Taking time early on an paying attention to these mundane labeling tasks pays off big time down the road. Weeks, months and years pass, but thanks to your diligent attention to keywords and ratings, you are able to pull up just the photos you want quickly and easily.

The Develop module is where you can get in there and play with your photos. Time for processing. Go wild and change the color temperature and tint, adjust the exposure, brightness and contrast. Make changes with the Recovery, Fill Light, Blacks, Clarity Vibrance, and Saturation sliders. If you're still not satisfied, you can call up the adjustment brush and lighten shadows by changing the exposure in a specific
area. If that's not enough, you can open up and use the Detail tool. Next, you have the Vignette tool to separate the background from the foreground.

Wait, there's more. You have a crop tool as well, and with a few keystrokes you can enlarge the virtual image and view it against a plain, black background.

The range of possibilities in the Develop module is stunning. You have to pinch yourself every-once-in-a-while and chant, "Lightroom is not a stand-alone product. It doesn't replace Photoshop." The line where Lightroom ends and Photoshop begins can get a little blurry.

Now that your image is the picture of perfection, you can head to the Print module. Here you'll find a nice selection of Lightroom templates for various printing options like 2-up Greeting Card, Contact Sheets, Triptych or Fine Art Mat to name a few.

So, what's new in this version of Lightroom? I mentioned the Adjustment Brush and the Post-Crop Vignette. Lightroom 2 also has improved speed, better and stronger integration with Photoshop, better printing, the keywording feature has more muscle, you can use multiple monitors and the Library, Slideshow, Web and Print modules are beefier and more useful. One particularly important area of improvement is in the Find, Filter and Sort features.

I don't want to give short shrift to the Slideshow, Web and Print modules. Like other modules in Lightroom 2, they are deliciously rich and full-featured. One of my personal favorites is the Slideshow feature. I use it frequently and enthusiastically. There are so many amazing ways to utilize your photos in slideshows.

Lightroom 2 is fantastically feature-rich. You'll probably buy it for Library module, but don't cheat yourself by not taking advantage of all the other Modules. Consider it your license to creatively liberate yourself. It can be your photo-fun place. Lightroom truly is a weird, wild and wonderful thing. Download a free, 30-day trial at www.adobe.com and give it a test drive.

5 out of 5 stars

Well-designed versatile productivity tool for digital photographers September 14, 2008
Rudy (Columbia, SC USA)
18 out of 19 found this review helpful

Version 2 of 'Adobe Photoshop Lightroom' (LR2) is a worthwhile expansion of last year's successful introduction -- in particular, the welcome capability of enhancing selected regional portions of an image (as against the prior more restrictive global tweaks); a Finder bar that consolidates previously separate searches for dates, keywords and metadata (eg: capture date, camera make, location, etc) into one accessible central location; capacity for huge files (up to 512 MB); as well as dual-monitor support. The option for 64-bit execution in both Mac and Vista will further speed processing (but nowhere near the doubling you'd anticipate) for users having more than 4MB RAM memory.

LR2 is a combination photo cataloging and processing application geared to high-quality high-volume workflow in the wide-gamut photoRGB color space -- the platform-neutral CD installs either the Win or Mac version with minimal hassle; whether Win or Mac, the LR2 screen has a virtually identical look and feel.

If you just want to spruce up family and travel snapshots, LR2 isn't for you; PSE6 autofix would be all you'd need and want -- saving time, space and yet another steep learning curve. If, on the other hand, you want the very best you can squeeze out of your digital camera, and don't mind investing a bit more time and effort, then LR2 comes as close as you can to high-volume production.

If you use the RAW ('digital negative') capability of a DSLR, nothing else beats LR2 which 'develops' the RAW file as it imports the file into the catalog, and retains its 12- or 14-bit per color channel precision throughout ... without ever altering the original 'negative'. This is a far faster process than either Photoshop or PSE6 can deliver. In fact, LR2 has pretty much become the standard for those professional photographers who favor RAW capture. This feature will become all the more meaningful as camera development relentlessly moves towards 16-bit pixels on a full-frame sensor (recall LR2's 512 MP capacity!).

While the great majority of your photos will be print-ready after LR2 'development' a few images might still need some targeted touchups from a dedicated application. Adobe would dearly love for you to use their flagship Photoshop cash cow. But, for most of us using photo inkjet printers, Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 (either Win or Mac) should prove more than adequate, a heck of a lot cheaper, and far easier to use. Conversely, if your photography demands heavy-duty professional CMYK press printing, then Photoshop (or similar) still is the big gorilla. Otherwise: healing, cloning, retouching and even adjustment layering are much the same in PSE6 as in Photoshop; because LR2 has already squeezed out most of the benefits of 16-bit color processing, the PSE6 8-bit/channel RGB limitation is no great handicap.

4 out of 5 stars

Great resource August 31, 2008
R. Cantor (Rockville, MD)
16 out of 16 found this review helpful

Lightroom 2 is a great resource for photographers, combining cataloging, development and print capabilities. The develop module is the knockout here. It's similar in many respects to Photoshop's Camera Raw, but in my opinion the Lightroom interface is superior. Though it's easy to open images in Photoshop, Lightroom's local adjustment brush often makes that additional step unnecessary, and the saving in file size is significant. I'm also a fan of Photoshop, but given its high price, those who don't have it already should consider whether Lightroom alone satisfies their needs.

The lack of a printed manual is regrettable, but a pdf version is available from Adobe at http://help.adobe.com/en_US/Lightroom/2.0/lightroom_2_help.pdf.

We'll be adding even more exciting features to assist you in the coming year.
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