Just How Good is Adobe Lightroom?
12:39 pm February 26th, 2007 by Sal Cangeloso
For years I have been looking for a great program for dealing with all my photos. I shoot mainly for work, vacations, and family events, but I have been using a digital camera for a long time (think Sony Mavica shooting onto floppy disks) and all those photos add up. I have developed good storage habits along with a intricate set of folders and naming conventions (for easy searching) but I always knew there was a better way.
When Itunes came out I saw that it was, in fact, possible to efficiently store lots of data while keeping it readily available. I don’t think anyone was surprised they someone finally got this right, but it was greatly appreciated and Itunes remains a fine program. The issue with photos are that not only to they pile up, just like with music, but also they once you have them stored you are going to want to edit them. Programs like Photoshop are great for editing, but they fall short when it comes to quick viewing and searching. Photoshop CS2 came along with Bridge which had some of the basic elements I was looking for like quick previews, batch renaming, keyword tagging, rating, and labeling. It was a step in the right direction, but still not nearly slick enough to win me over and ended up just being a way to interface with Photoshop.
So as it turns out, I like Lightroom a lot. This post was original going to be a lot longer, but I will keep it short and sweet- Lightroom is a great way to organize your photos and it has a number of very useful built-in tools. If you are a photo nerd and have to customize a lot, it can do a number of adjustments on the fly and it is especially great if you are using RAW images. If you don’t like to play with your photos, or you would rather do this in Photoshop, Lightroom is great at organizing them.
Aside from customization and organization Lightroom has a few very useful tools, especially the automatic photogallery. If you set up an album the program can make it into a great HTML or Flash photo gallery in just minutes. The number of customizations you can do to the gallery are limited, but you have full control of the colors and can also decide what camera settings are display in case you want to have some information for reference. This is a great feature with only one problem, the maximum size of each image shown is dependent on the width of the gallery. If you decide to have a narrow (say three thumbnails across) the maximum image size might be just 500px with no image to click on the image and have the original appear. This is a pretty serious problem…
The verdict? I like Lightroom a lot and will be sticking with it until the beta is over. I am not sure if it’s worth the $200 price, but I’d love to see it included with Photoshop, in that case I would definitely use it. For the time being I, sadly, won’t be able to put down the money for it so I guess I will stop using it when the beta period is over but if the price was more affordable, I would say it is a must have…
