Adobe Lightroom 1.0

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 1.0 is Adobe’s new software for managing your photos. It’s not directly related to Photoshop, although you can open up an image selected in Lightroom with Photoshop, and it does have some image tweaking capabilities built-in. Any subsequent references to Photoshop here will refer to Adobe Photoshop (and NOT Lightroom).

There are five major areas within the application: Library, Develop, Slideshow, Print, and Web. The Library is the place for organizing your photos. Develop allows you to tweak the images, with tools for changing the curves, brightness/contrast, color, etc. Slideshow lets you create a PDF slideshow of your photos. And Print and Web allow you to print to publish your photos to a web page using HTML or Flash.

I love the Library. It let’s you organize and preview your photos on a light-table-like area. Photos can be rotated, tagged, “Quick Developed,” or you can add/edit metadata. Quick Develop allows you to use out-of-the-box presets or custom pre-saved settings from the Develop interface. One little gripe here: If I rotate the image in the Library and open it in Photoshop, it’s not rotated. I’d prefer to see the original file rotated to match the view in the Library.

Develop is pretty slick, but any serious tweaking will probably be done with Photoshop rather than Lightroom. If you have a bunch of photos with a color cast (say from a shoot with off-color lighting), then you can quickly apply changes to a bunch of photos with Lightroom.

Slideshow is okay for PDF, but it would be nice to see some more of this functionality in the Flash slideshow, which oddly enough is available under Web. In particular, there seems to be no way of adding a soundtrack to the Flash slideshow (again under Web), but you can add one to the PDF Slideshow. I think development must have started before Adobe bought Macromedia and Adobe wanted to plug Acrobat rather than Flash.

Print is okay too, with a lot of the tools you’d expect for printing out your photos. One big gripe I’ve got with Print is that its settings do not seem to match those in Photoshop CS 2. When I print the same photo from Lightroom and Photoshop the tones are different – quite different. In this case, Lightroom is printing rather washed-out photos compared to Photoshop.

Web is a quick and easy way to publish you photos in a gallery suitable for the web. You can select an HTML version or a Flash version. Both are customizable, but only in limited ways (although you can certainly tweak the HTML directly, if you’re up to it!

Is it worth $300? That’s a tough one. Lightroom is handy. It’s easy to use. If you’re making a living doing portraits and you need to sit with clients to go through the shots, it might be very useful indeed. But for any serious editing, you’re going to want Photoshop.