Some of you might wonder what Lightroom is? The short answer is “another image processing software from Adobe beside Photoshop and Elements”. The long answer would be “a freaking awesome software to help you process hundreds of photos in short amount of time by maximizing your work flow while utilizing presets and databases.” It might sounds scary at first, but I’ll tell you why I love this pretty piece of software.
Link to Lightroom homepage: Click here
Default Lightroom interface. Click to enlarge.
1. Sleek Folder System
The folder system makes it really easy to find the photos you wanted without long searching. I have more than 40.000 Images in my database right now, from 2003 to 2009, but i never had any problem looking for the event I shot 2 years ago.
2. Easy Metadata Searching
For example, in one event you shot an event with Nikon d80 and d300, while your friend shoot with Canon 40d. After the event, you download all the photos from the three camera to the same folder. You want to put watermark on your pictures, but not on your friend’s, so what can you do? You can enable Lightroom to only display the images from specific camera type or specific lens type.
3. Flagging System
After you download that 346 photos from your memory card, you scan it quickly, and you find several images you like, and several you don’t like. With traditional folder system, you will have to pick them up and putting the ones you like in another folder or deleting the ones you don’t like so u do not clutter the folder. In Lightroom, you can simply tag the picture as “flagged” which means you like it, or tag the picture by color (Lightroom provides 7 color tag you can use), and you can tag a picture as “Rejected”. Note that whatever tag you use, it doesn’t affect the picture in any way. You then can choose to display only pictures that has “red” tag, maybe its the pictures that has cats on it (for example), or chose the flagged photos for export to web later. You can always change the flag anytime.
4. Keyword Tagging
OK, lets say you shoot lots of koalas in many different occasions and you want to display all the picture with koalas from your database. If you use the tagging system, this is as easy as one click of a mouse. You can tag a picture with whatever keyword you wanted. You can even tag the picture with more than one keyword, just like blog posts.
Lightroom develop screen. Arsenal of weapon for you to exploit. Click to enlarge.
5. Awesome Array of Development Tools
No editing software is complete without editing, right? Of course! Lightroom has one of the most powerful and versatile development tools I’ve ever seen for photo editing software. Well, except Photoshop and Elements. Lightroom provides those tools you can use:
- Histogram Checker/Slider
- Red eye removal
- Dust removal (clone/heal)
- Cropping
- Graduate Filters
- Brush (exposure, saturation, contrast, clarity, sharpness, exposure)
- Basic Adobe Camera Raw sliders (White balance, exposure, blacks, saturation, etc)
- Tone Curve
- Grayscale Sliders
- Split Toning
- Detail (sharpening, noise, chromatic aberration, etc)
- Vignettes
- Camera Calibration (colors sliders)
Wow… That’s quite a lot of tools eh! All the photos you see on my blog is processed with ONLY Lightroom tools. I haven’t used Photoshop layers yet. I’m sure Photoshop can do more, but i’m happy with Lightroom because of its simplicity.
6. Develop Presets
With that many develop tools, chances are you will be using some similar setting for most of your pictures. So instead of repeating to slide the bars to the same place, why don’t we make a preset? Basically a preset is a saved setting of your developments. You can set it up by yourself, download it from the internet, or use the ones Lightroom provided for you.
I think you have seen the two post processing tutorial i wrote before. Both of them utilizes the 300 preset i got from mikelao’s website. Now know that the 300 preset is just one the many i use in regular basis. I’ll be writing more post processing tuts later on.
Lightroom printing screen. Enough control for you to customize your prints. Click to enlarge.
7. Printing Interface
Chances are, if you are serious in photography, you will want to print your masterpiece and hang it on the wall. Now Lightroom comes with a really good printing interface. It uses templates you can choose. Again, the template work the same as presets, so you can download the templates from the internet to use.
There are two more feature in Lightroom that i never use, which is Slideshow generator and Web Gallery generator. If you are interested in making a slideshow or gallery, this will be a plus for you.
This article by no means try to convince you to use Lightroom. And no, Adobe didn’t pay me to do this review. All of the points above is written according to my personal experience with Lightroom.
I hope you enjoy the article, and drop me a comment if you like it.
If you like this post, you might also like:
- Difficulty of Using Adobe Lightroom, or Lack Thereof
- Lightroom Develop Preset for Smoothing Skin
- How To: Copyright Signature Watermark On Lightroom 2 Using Mogrify Plugin
- How To: HDR Look From JPG Using Lightroom 2.1
- How To: Fantastic Mysterious Effect Using Lightroom “300″ Preset
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