Adobe Lightroom 2.0 Review

I realize that Lightroom 2.0 is not an impulse purchase at $300 but I still highly recommend it to anyone who would consider themselves a photography enthusiast, semi-pro, or professional. Even for novices, the ease of which Lightroom 2.0 allows you to enhance and manage your hundreds or thousand of photos makes it worth considering. The ability to touch up, enhance, crop, straighten, and alter a RAW image without having to use up more valuable drive space with duplicate copies is a blessing. I guess the same holds true for JPEG images. Many consumers don't realize that every time they open and resave a JPEG image the quality is reduced. With Lightroom 2.0 you can enhance JPEG images without having to resave over them after each session. When you finally do decide to export an edited photo - this will be considered a first generation image (one down from the original).

The powerful new localized Adjustment Brush and Graduated Filter alone make Lightroom 2.0 worth an upgrade from previous versions and when you add in all of the other capabilities and time-saving features, its not difficult to justify the $300 price. If you use multiple monitors you'll be happy to know that Lightroom 2.0 now supports a dual monitor set up.

Nothing is perfect and that includes Lightroom, but my wish list is pretty small.

* The slideshow module is very weak when it comes to export options (there really aren't any - excluding PDF - and who uses PDF files to give a slideshow anyway?) If you just raised your hand then I apologize for that broad-based statement
* The Print Module should allow for a multi-image layout
* A Photo book creation tool should be an option in the Print Module considering how popular Photo books are with consumers and professionals
* The Develop Module should include a lens (perspective) correction tool
* Lightroom needs an option to continuously monitor (select) imported folders. Lightroom does have the ability to watch a folder for new images, but the folder must be newly created or empty before turning on the Auto update feature. Even then this folder becomes a temporary staging area while Lightroom copies the folder to another folder of your choosing. order for this function to work

Ron Risman


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