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A photographer’s must: Adobe Lightroom
20th March 2008
I take a lot of photos, and I do mean a lot of photos. Photos of trees, boxes on the ground, anything that I think might make a decent image. But with this obsessional snapping comes a problem. How do you view them all with out losing your mind?
That’s what I wondered for a few years. I have used many pieces of software in the past, default camera manufacturer software, free photo viewers, and Apple Aperture (very disappointing). Yet none of them really came up with the goods. I could see all my photos laid out before me but could do nothing with them. I couldn’t even rename them properly.
Then I came across Adobe Lightroom. I have been using it now for a few months and it has saved my snap happy life and my precious mind.
I can import photos, tag them, rename them all in the matter of seconds. Making corrections to them is also very easy. The interface is fairly simple and the develop tools are perfect for what I need. It is much easier then say bringing them all into Photoshop, which is as clunky as you can get. Using RAW settings on the camera makes things even better. The RAW image format is so much more useful than JPEG, which is always on by default.
It really makes importing your images more efficient and less of headache when you have taken hundreds of photos on holiday and neglected to delete as you went along. It is also very fast compared to other products out there and that’s a huge point for me.
You can change exposure and white balance settings easily, but I still always import the selected photos into Photoshop for the final edit, such as cropping, sharpening and general messing around.
One thing though – Lightroom isn’t cheap, and as usual with Adobe, prices in Europe are far higher then the US, which is ridiculous and a real kick in the face. This is a pity for a company who creates excellent software, but as we all know, domination brings on all the cracks. Something has to be done about this pricing difference or they will run into serious competition down the road. This rant is over…
So what do you do? If you want software that simply works and you are an avid amateur or professional photographer, buy it or even download the trial version to see what I mean. If you want something with less bells, whistles and a mediocre experience, download something free.
[ Filed under Lightroom Reviews Software ]
