Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 1.0 (Win/Mac) [OLD VERSION]
by Adobe
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Software Reviews of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 1.0 (Win/Mac) [OLD VERSION]
Customer Review: Fantastic for prolific amateur photographers
Summary: 5 Stars
The several-day learning curve is worth it, even if you aren't a professional. Lightroom cut the time I spend sorting photos in a third.
It's well worth spending some time learning the keyboard shortcuts - check out the video tutorials on Adobe's site (even before you buy). They'll give you a sense of how you can speed up your workflow, and spend your time actually *taking* pictures, rather than fiddling with them after the fact.
Customer Review: It's All About Workflow!
Summary: 4 Stars
Before Lightroom, there were the dark ages...
I have been enlightened. The workflow of Lightroom has made me much more productive, and enabled me to deliver much more to my demanding photo clients. If you shoot hundreds or thousands of photos per week, it is a must have.
You'll need a lot of RAM and a fast CPU to really experience the joy of lightroom without too much of the frustration, but things have improved dramatically with recent updates. Do make sure you hit the Adobe website and grab the latest version.
What Lightroom does:
Imagine a darkroom, you can adjust photo exposures, colors, tone curves, correct for lens artifacts, convert to black and white, crop, rotate, sharpen... everything you might need to do in order to turn your raw digital negatives into beautiful photographs. Lightroom is it. We have entered the age of photo enlightenment. Pair it up with Photoshop for the ultimate in digital photo post production.
In addition to the photo manipulation features, Lightroom also offers comprehensive photo cataloging, metadata management, and keyword management. It makes finding just the right photo a breeze. Powerful export features let you choose a variety of file formats, sizes, and actions. Once you get into the groove, it's a joy to work with.
Save time, create better finished photos, export for web or print -- easy! It was enhancing my productivity from the first day of beta testing. I'll never look back.
Customer Review: Almost Pointless
Summary: 1 Stars
If you're a professional photographer who needs to adjust multiple, similar photographs in terms of brightness, contrast, and hue- then this software is a gift from the gods.
For anyone else- people who want to edit one-off photos you took of your family during the last holiday, this software is pretty much pointless and FAR over-priced.
Thankfully we were smart enough to download the latest trial version from adobe before dropping hundreds of dollars on this dud. We stared at it for a while trying to figure out how to do a very simple edit and then gave up (BTW: I have 25 years in the IT industry and am pretty proficient with Photoshop).
Instead, I found a demo of a Photoshop-like program pre-installed on our computer (which costs only $60 to register) and tried to perform the same operation on the same photo. It took about 90 seconds.
Guess which one we'll be buying?
Just before trying both demo programs, I had a chat with a pro photographer (whose name I'll withhold because any decent pro photographer would know who he is, immediately), and he did not have anything positive to say about lightroom, suggesting Photoshop instead.
Customer Review: Digital Photo Workflow System
Summary: 4 Stars
This is a great product for what it does. It is very good for screening the mass quantities of photos I take with my digital SLR, and is quite good at raw conversion, and minor adjustments in white balance, exposure and the like. I like the filing system as well. The slide show feature is very nice, but it is irksome that you can't export the slide shows to anything but pdf files... in other words, you can't export to a cd or dvd to play on TV's and the like. This inability is why I took away a star. Another nitpik is that iTunes is NOT available/integrated for slide show background music in the windows version (other mp3 formats do work, and iTunes does work in the MAC version) Customer Review: Its quite nice but....
Summary: 2 Stars
I am sorry to rain on the parade of adulations for lightroom but..
I have been trialing this software for 26days to date and i simply cannot (and yet also can) understand the hype and adulations this s/w has received to date..
On the plus side..
1. Its a gorgeous user interface
2. It is a great library & catalog program
3. Sorry, there isnt a 3..thats it.
On the negative side..
1. At best it is a so-so image EDITOR.. it recommends you go pay $600 for CS3 to do image editing?.. Luckily you can get Corel Paint shop Pro for $79 and launch it from Lightroom.
2. Its claim to be "all you need" is as false as you get.. unless sending unedited images to the web is all you plan to do.
I have canon equipment and so can use DPP for RAW conversion (free), zoombrowser (free) or Corel photo album @ $39 for organising then honestly is an extra $260 worth it?
In summary,
Look, i am sorry, but for $300 i would expect something more than Elements on steroids, and when you still need an external editor and an external print manager such as Qimage this fails way way short on value for money except for professionals with huge volumes of images.
I am disappointed. I had hoped for a single solution (as claimed) to my workflow...yet i have gone back to using DPP for RAW light management, and i still have to use Paint shop pro for those 5-10% of images that need editing, so in essence lightroom has substituted a prettier interface than corel photo album for image management. For the hobbyist and serious amateur i feel this $299 is more of an ego trip rather than a necessary product.