Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 1.0 (Win/Mac) [OLD VERSION]
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Software Reviews of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 1.0 (Win/Mac) [OLD VERSION]
Customer Review: Great photo editing tool
Summary: 5 Stars
I've had Lightroom for a few days now and I love it. There are still lots of things I need to learn about Lightroom but here are a few things I like so far.
*** You can rename a group of photos in a matter of seconds.
*** You can change a large number of photos to black in white when you
import the photos into lightroom.
*** Lightroom builds a photo gallery for you to display all your photos
on the web in a matter of minutes. It resizes all photos for you.
These are just a few valuable tools that I have used so far. When you are working with between 100 and 300 photos for a gallery, Lightroom makes it easy to organize and edit all of the photos at once.
Customer Review: Who lives for editing?
Summary: 5 Stars
I can't speak for everyone, but editing photos ranks pretty high on my list of things I wish I didn't have to do. Especially since I am a motosports photographer for a magazine and can have up to 3,000 images to shift through and cherry pick (which are always due 'NOW' or 'yesterday')
Lightroom works great for me in that it allows me to quickly tag, delete, sort, and rank my photos. I can sort photos for different clients, quickly fix minor problems, watermark, and export to disk at lightning speeds. Like when I had shot a press intro, I had to distribute photos to 3 different magazines and they couldn't get the same images. I assigned each client a different color tag, and ranked photos either a "5" for an absolute perfect photo, or a "4" for a photo that needed some photoshop work (such as blurring logos, or license plates). Then I could sort the photos with 4-star ratings, import them into photoshop and export them back into lightroom when I was done.
Though if I could change one thing, it would be the documentation. That little pamphlet-- what is that? You really need to learn Lightroom, how everything works, and how those features can work for you. Once you know those things, LR can really help your workflow. Toss the booklet, and do a search online for some video tutorials.
A last little note... this program does not play nice with older PC's. At least, it's super slow and annoying to operate on my husband's 3-4 yr old PC that has limited space. It works quickly and beautifully on my Mac Pro, but it is up-to-date OS-wise and has plenty of free harddrive space and RAM. Something you may want to take into consideration.
Customer Review: Adobe knows images!
Summary: 4 Stars
Lightroom is great for professional digital photographers and Photoshop enthusiast, but if you're a hobbyist you may want to go a simpler and less expensive route.
If you shoot in RAW the program can be a lot of fun and produce some very impressive work. RAW is "unprocessed" images before the camera processes the image. Lightroom allows you to do the processing and that is a huge benefit and give you complete control over your finial image output. RAW allows color adjustment, white balance and better image sharpening.
I have been doing freelance web design for many years and the web templates that come with Lightroom are very professional if you do not know anything about web design and development. Also like many Adobe web products it comes with nice ftp software. It does a good job making nice web pages, but you still have to create your website, it isn't an html editor.
The program has a slick interface with 5 tabs; Library, Develop, Slideshow, Print and Web. You import your images in Library mode, fine tune (play) with your images in Develop and use Slideshow or Print for you output and finally Web to load them up to your website. It does it all and it does it remarkably well.
The biggest draw back to this program is that is doesn't come with a book, it is more a brochure. It you decide to purchase the product it would be a good idea to pick up a 3rd party book at the same time. Also you want to make sure you camera shoots in Raw, don't assume that you have a new camera and it does.
So is the program a buy, a definite yes if you shoot in RAW format, but if you don't you may not get your value from this program.
Keith Johnson
Manager of the Seattle Flash User Group
Customer Review: Useless for Nikon raw (.NEF)
Summary: 3 Stars
I purchased this software soon after I acquired my Nikon D200. After importing my pictures into LR, the photos appeared dull and lifeless. I explored whether I was alone in my impression on the Adobe LightRoom Support Forum and found a plethora of posts documenting similar experiences. Adobe seems to have a lot of excuses which mostly blame Nikon.
Bottom line is that LightRoom is dead in the water if you want to import and manage Nikon Raw (NEF) files. I went ahead and purchased Apple Aperture which I've found to be an awesome piece of work. Yes, it requires cutting edge hardware (MacIntel and lots of RAM), but if that is available it is an amazingly powerful program. It comes with a DVD training and tutorial disc which can put a user into expert status within an hour. Aperture- Five stars. LightRoom- Reject.
Customer Review: Eh...
Summary: 3 Stars
EDIT: Okay, I'd like to humbly retract my previous review of Lightroom. I just bought a Canon 5D, and am only shooting with it in RAW. I pretty much immediately realized what an asset this program is going to be. It loads the photos incredibly quickly, displays them beautifully (you can make impromptu slideshows that look incredibly professional), allows you to filter through them (using flags, stars, keywords, etc), etc. etc. Now, to be fair, I will definitely be using Photoshop (especially a newer version...CS3 or 4) still. However, Lightroom is an entirely different program that really should not be considered in the same genre.
Technically, you probably don't 'need' this program if you're a photographer. Canon's more recent software includes a RAW viewer that handily converts files into JPG's, and the interface isn't terrible. However, I personally am glad I bought this (and even more glad I returned to it). It's a professional program that understands what photographers want.
END EDIT
First of all, if you KNOW you want to buy this, check [...] first (if you're a student/academic) to see if you can apply for the discount (it only cost me $98 there).
That having been said, as a user of Photoshop CS, I wasn't too pleased with the program. I feel like the adjustments you can make in Lightroom seem elementary compared to the comprehensive array of instruments you can use in Photoshop. However, Lightroom doesn't claim to be as good as Photoshop, so I suppose I shouldn't berate it for this.
The interface of Lightroom is beautiful in comparison to Photoshop...but I still haven't gotten used to the crazy "import" function. It seems very counterintuitive to me that you can import a file, heavily edit the file, and yet not have it on your computer. Perhaps I just need to spend more time with the program.
I wouldn't recommend this to anyone with Photoshop. Photoshop is a beast! Lightroom seems more for the layperson who doesn't want to deal with the more complicated interface/controls of Photoshop.
I'm not saying that there aren't people out there who wouldn't pledge their lives to this program. Perhaps you're one of those who will find this to be a great investment. That having been said, I would recommend against it. For $300, go buy yourself a version of Photoshop.