Late last week I got my hands on Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2. While I confess to having no previous experience with Lightroom and no real knowledge of how to actually use this product, I did not let that keep me from experimenting.
(Digital) Photography is still relatively new to me, and photo editing is equally new. In the year plus that I have been taking pictures I have been playing with Photoshop and working on HDR processing with Photomatix Pro 3. The results have been mixed, but the experimentation has been rewarding. With Lightroom, I believe I have found another superior piece of software to add to my design arsenal; with robust functionality and an intuitive interface, Lightroom offers power users a tool to transform ordinary photographs into wonderful pieces of art (Greg Molyneux does not equal power user).
The picture above is the accidental by-product of someone who has no clue what he’s doing in Lightroom. Nevertheless, you can see I was able to fix an overexposed picture that was taken with a basic point-and-shoot camera, and correct the exposure while adding an antique pseudo-HDR effect within Lightroom. In my opinion the end result is far more interesting than the ordinary shot of me looking like I’m up to no good in a German nightclub that shall remain unnamed so as to protect the parties involved.
I’ll have more Adobe Lightroom updates coming as I begin to better understand the software.
Is anyone else using this software? Sharing some images, stories, or tips on their experiences with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 would be great.
4 Comments
I am poised to purchase this product by the middle of June. I confirmed that my point and shoot does NOT support the RAW format. Do you know if HDR is possible if your camera doesn’t support RAW?
The short answer is yes. With Photomatix for example, you will be able to render HDR images from a single JPEG. The problem that you will encounter is a bit more noise (grainy resolution) in your HDR renderings.
Now for the picture above I used a JPEG that was taken on a 4.1 mega pixel Kodak camera. If you are happy with the HDR-esque rendering that I produced in Lightroom then you will certainly be pleased with the product.
I’m curious, what’s the difference between Lightroom and PhotoShop CS4?
Hi Paul, great question.
While my time spent with Lightroom is still very limited at this point, I would say the difference between Lightroom and Photoshop rests in the User Interface. Both products (for the most part) can achieve the same effects on images (i.e. level adjustments, exposure changes, hue adjustments, layer masks, image sharpening, cropping, red eye elimination, etc.). Lightroom just does this in a much more user friendly way.
In addition to that Lightroom is great for batch processing of photographs. For example, if you were taking a bunch of pictures at a wedding and created a great image effect for one of the pictures in Lightroom you could then process the entire batch of wedding photos through Lightroom and have the entire wedding set achieve the same consistent look at the click of a button.
You can crop your photos in seconds to measure up to standard image sizes. You can apply metadata (or keywords) to your sets and upload them directly to Flickr if you have an account. You can save image rendering presets so you can reapply them easily in the future. Lightroom even lets you publish your image sets directly to your own website!
The possibilities are really endless and I think this is a must have piece of software for people who are into their digital photos. Granted, while Photoshop performs many of the same functions as Lightroom; Lightroom just makes your life much easier.
Keep in mind I don’t think Lightroom will replace Photoshop either. More than likely you will still be performing extractions, transformations, and content aware scaling to your photographs in Photoshop after you have tweaked the images in Lightroom.
One Trackback
[...] Lightroom By Greg Molyneux | Published: August 19, 2009 I have been editing my photographs with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 quite a bit lately, putting Photomatix Pro 3 on the back burner. In my quest to render quality [...]