Adobe Photoshop Lightroom
* This is a legacy post from my old blog, which I have re-posted with an edited timestamp to reflect the original date.
A photoshop user all my life, I’ve recently come to use Adobe’s new Lightroom application an awful lot. So much, in fact, I rarely fire up photoshop any more. The tools for organizing and editing photographs are incredibly easy and intuitive in Lightroom, and everything is at your fingertips in the Develop panel. What if everything you needed to make powerful photographs was within reach along the right side of the screen? Exposure, color temperature, blacks, sharpening, vibrance, saturation, noise reduction, vingette… it’s all right there and easy to access, not hidden away in dialogue dropdowns.
I really recommend checking it out if you are looking for a better way to process your photos. It doesn’t have individual area editing such as spot burn and dodge or layers, but it does do a fantastic job of editing pictures for overall better exposure, contrast and color. It features an amazing copy and paste function that allows you to quickly process series of images taken in similar conditions. Even as a long-time photoshop user, I am seeing new ways to process my photos in Lightroom simply becuase it makes everything to easy and simple to play with. On top of all this, Lightroom handles RAW files easily and performs non-destructive edits that you can tweak again and again without losing data. For instance, you can change exposure, adjust sharpening, do some color tweaking and then go back and modify the exposure again with no problems. My wish is for spot burn and dodge tools and some more powerful clone tools in future updates. Do yourself a favor and try it out. It’s really quicker and easier than the beast photoshop has become.