Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 1.4 Review

Being someone into digital photography, like everyone else, I don’t just have a camera. I have 2 main softwares to edit and manage my images (besides Windows Explorer of course). One of them is what I’m talking about, Lightroom. The other, is Photoshop CS3. Lightroom manages images and tells you everything you want to know about them, exports them into Photoshop for further editing and itself also edits photos. The RAW editor for Lightroom is especially excellent and maybe even superior to Adobe Camera RAW I have available in Photoshop CS3. But I still use Photoshop to edit most of my images. Why? Because Lightroom is more like a file manager and with my 4000+ images and counting from both the EOS Digitals alone, it lags like mad sometimes.

Lightroom can be especially useful if you like to look for your images through descriptions of them. You can tag your images, you can rate them up to 5 stars as well as flag them as rejected or picked. It’s like a studio photographer’s dream. Although Lightroom’s image processing engine is more refined than Photoshop CS3′s, it still lacks features compared to the alleged king of image editing, Photoshop CS3. I shall refer to Photoshop CS3 as PS and Lightroom as LR for the rest of this post, following Adobe’s codes for the softwares. This review only covers some of LR’s editing features, not the managing ones. Well, here goes my insight of LR, to you.

It’s really easy to add a certain kick to an image. Open > Develop > Brightness > Curves > Exposure > Blacks > Fill Light > Recovery > Clarity > (a little bit of) Sharpness and you’ll get a total change. Still, for recovering detail in shadows and highlights, I personally prefer PS’ Shadows and Highlights tool. Much easier to use. However, Lightroom is more lossless.

Think you’ve lost some detail in a certain image? LR has a useful and non-destructive clarity and sharpness (but not too much of it) tool which will really give you razor-sharp details. Contrast was boosted in this image.

If you use a full-frame camera, which really pushes lenses to its limits and set the aperture wide open, you will get vignetting. Just remove it with the vignetting adding/removing slider.

LR also boosts vibrance very effectively, as shown in this screenshot. Just f.y.i., when mum shops, dad and I will go around testing the sharpness of our cameras Screenshot below will again show how good LR is at sharpening.

Lock (what?!) on some kind of handbag the size of my camera bag (wth?). LR really sharpens things up.

I seriously hate chromatic abberation. CA appars on photographs in edges, along transitions of harsh contrast and normally on super wide lenses. Not to worry, just blardy remove them. lol

Probably the worst scenario for some: a wrongly metered image resulting in underexposure. Not for LR users though. Just do Exposure > Brightness > Recovery > Blacks > Curves and it’ll turn out nicely

And not forgetting one of LR’s neatest feature – the EXIF viewer.

Okay, the precision of the time and everything depends on your camera actually. And I know this EXIF viewer isn’t as detailed as Windows’ own one but see that lens section? How cool is that? You can see what lens you used for that image, if for any reason you’ve forgotten. Whenever I forget that, I’d just guess from the focal length data. Oh btw, from my experience, images taken by Nikons don’t have the lens data. (camera) Owner/Creator’s name is also there, but it’s cropped off here.

My conclusion would go simple. Lightroom is a great, powerful tool for hobbyist and professional photographers alike. It’s great for recovering from unsharp/underexposed images and increasing vibrance and detail. Photoshop would be more useful for architectural photographers as it has a perspective control feature. Also, it has a very useful automated HDR function. It’s also better for web usage because with it, you can insert watermarks and all that wordings into the image. However, I don’t advise overkill on these programs. I strictly don’t employ that “Oh, it’ll be fixed in Photoshop/other editing programs” attitude. Shoot a good image and improve it in Photoshop/Lightroom/others (: If this review is liked, leave a comment. I might do a Photoshop CS3 one

Well, till the next update (: Thanks for reading!