Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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64 of 70 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Great editor, but not a professional product., 3 Jan 2009
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Programme (What's this?)
RAW development software seems to be a weak point in the use of digital cameras. There are suprisingly few software packages specifically for RAW, and of those available they often seem to be either crippingly slow, chronically un-userfriendly, or give poor images.
Lightroom gives excellent results, is reasonably simple to use, and is powerful enough that you can use it as a photoshop replacement if all you do is edit your photographs and have no need of ever recompositing. You can easily remove dust marks, add gradient filters, do some dodging and burning and fiddle about to get the best from your shots. You can compensate for some of the pecularities of your lenses, or even add some if you're after a quirky lomo or holga look. You can then save any of your particular settings as a preset for resuse.
It's excellent for showing shots to clients, as you can instantly run a professinal looking slide show at any time, complete with your own logo. You can save hours creating beautiful websites automatically in seconds and easily print images complete with watermarks in moments.
However, there are downsides and they are big ones.
Firstly, this is meant to be a professional product. I'm sorry, but it just isn't. The reason? Complete lack of network support. Unbeliveably, lightroom works off a single database stored away from the image - that is, unlike most other RAW editors, there isn't a file sitting next to the RAW file with my edits in. They are stored seperately, on a single database, and that database can't be stored on a network. Any edit I make to a shot on my laptop can't be easily viewed on my desktop PC with the edits in place. Let me say that again - a PROFESSIONAL product that can't be effectively used on a network. Also, move a RAW file outside of lightroom, and database will lose it and your edits are gone. Any corruption to that single database, and you've lost everything. Trying to juggle multiple computers against a single database, without accidentally overwriting , moving or renaming a file is essentially impossible. For this alone, Lightroom is effectively not fit for professional use.
Documentation. When I spend 200+pounds on a product, I expect to get manual. Lightroom doesn't even come with installation instructions. Even on the CD, there is no PDF of a manual, and the in-program help takes you online to Adobe's website. Fine if you have internet access, but potentially very embarrasing if you're with a client out in the wilds somewhere and you get stuck.
Memory. Lightroom eats memory. Fair enough, it's doing a lot of work, but it's meant to be used in conjunction with Photoshop - but photoshop slows to a crawl because Lightoom has used up all the memory. Make sure you have a beefy PC.
Cataloguing. Because of the way Lightroom uses a single database, you have to use Lightrooms system of cataloguing. This is extrememly irritating - I might have an odd shot on a memory stick I need to convert quickly but I can't just file-open-save. I have to have to import it, give it keywords, and then as soon as I disconnect my memory stick I have an orphan file in my lightroom database. It's incredibly annoying, especially if you already have your own effective system of filing your shots.
This doesnt' take away from the excellent results Lightoom will give you, and I will use lightroom on the really important shoots because of it's quality, but I find myself using free open-source alternatives more and more such as Rawtherapee. It's a little harder to use, but the quality is as good, and it lets me work how I want to work, not how Adobe insist I work.
Also, be aware that if you don't shoot in RAW, or if you have no idea what that even means, then this really isn't the product for you. Lightroom is really intended for semi-pro and pro photographers. You can touch up and edit JPG files, but there are much better and cheaper alternatives for that.
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24 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Great Addition To A Photographer's Arsenal, 22 Dec 2008
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Programme (What's this?)
As photography and digital images become more complex (RAW and high dynamic range for example), software will have to be developed to assist in the work flow, and to provide tools that will allow users to exploit the full benefits on offer. In a perfect world this could be done in as little time as possible without having to slave over images, and allowing photographers to spend more time behind the lens instead of in front of the computer screen.
And so Lightroom 2 is born, software from Adobe that claims to be essential for today's digital photography work flow, allowing you to import, process, manage and show your images. The first edition of Lightroom was popular, and rivaled Apple's Aperture software. So this second version is a welcome addition to the Adobe family.
New editing features have been added, so you can now make adjustments and touch ups in Lightroom itself, without having to switch between programs. These include an adjustment brush, and a graduated filter tool, that's excellent for compensating under or overexposed parts of a photograph. Improved printing facilities that let you print out on to templates or custom sheets. Images can be sharpened automatically, and to an exacting standard, saving time especially if you have a lot of photos to work on. Also included are improved dodging and burning tools, as well as comparison options for different settings. 64-bit support for both Windows and Mac has also been included. A welcome improvement, is the introduction of 'smart' metatags, providing you with a means for organising all of your photographs with keywords and category's that actual work, that even let you organize data over several physical drives. Adobe Lightroom 2 even gives you the ability to show off your images online in web galleries.
Dual monitor support has been added, it allows you to have what you are working on split between the two. Useful if you are discuss various shots with a client. The software interface isn't too different from from the previous versions, so existing user's will have have little trouble upgrading to this version, while at the same time new users will appreciate the uncluttered and easy to learn interface.
The organizational facilities are excellent. Prior to using this software I had hundreds of images in dozens of folders, that were then themselves in folders, then backed up, however now after spending some time in Lightroom, all of my images are now easy to find and to both use and update.
A very useful feature is the ability to Merge to HDR and Merge to Panorama, allowing you to work with and process multiple images faster and easily than Photoshop itself.
Adobe Lightroom does not change your original photo, it will leave it untouched (meaning you no longer have to make copies of your originals and keep them separate,) applying any changes you make to data file. This also means that you can step backwards undoing multiple changes that you've made, with out having to start over again.
The software does have a few minor problems. I would say that the documentation is hopeless, but I can't even say that - simply because there was none at all. But there are plenty of free online video tutorials just a mouse click away. The software is resource hungry, you will not be able to run Lightroom 2 very well on a low end computer, without having to wait for seconds at a time between changes. It's also noticeably slower than Adobe Photoshop at opening very large files.
But apart from that, Lightroom makes processing photos faster and easier. Anybody who has tried to work with a large batch of RAW files, will know it can quickly become repetitive, but Lightroom does 'lighten' the load. No one photo package of any nature nature can do absolutely everything and this package is no exception. While it does offer some good and genuinely useful tools, as a standalone product it can't do everything. It would therefore be better when backed up by a more comprehensive package such as Adobe Photoshop, which would provide you with additional tools and facilities, in case you do need them.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The amateur's review (particularly for Elements users), 20 Aug 2009
In a word, wow! I've had a DSLR about 6 months, but have taken nearly 10,000 exposures (of which I've probably kept 10%). Once I moved to shooting in RAW (which if you're not doing, you don't really need Lightroom), my workflow began to take quite a while. I'd do an initial review of my images using Picassa, to get rid of the ones not worth processing (but which looked ok on the camera LCD). I'd then use the Photoshop Elements RAW editor to sort out white balance and exposure. This works fine, but it's a fairly slow process and a bit of a clunky interface. I'd then export to Elements, do my cropping and effects, and then batch save as JPEGs. Lightroom has been an absolute revalation. It automatically imports the images (being really flexible about file locations and names etc), and then quickly lets you review and reject images. This step alone is MILES quicker than my previous process. The white balance and exposure settings are much more comprehensive than the RAW editor in Elements (I can't compare against full Photoshop) and it has some brilliant pre-sets (such as high contrast B&W, cold tone) which very qickly give me results which are 95% what I want, and I can then tweak. The tools for cropping etc are very good, and there are several image maipulation tools built in which make me think I won't need to use Elements post-processing functionality much in future.
Downsides? I haven't really found any to be honest. It's not cheap, but do look at Adobe's educational licensing options (eg do you have kids at home who may qualify?). There's no real documentation, but if you've used a RAW editor before, it's fairly straightforward. I recommend the Scott Kelby guide to get the most out of the software though. In terms of processing, I see some reviewers have a problem with the amount of memory etc it needs. I have a 2 year old laptop, and processing in lightroom is much faster than in Picassa & Elements. Finally, if you have full photoshop, then you need to read some reviews to see how it compares to the RAW editor in there, as I can't give an opinion on that (as I've not used it).
In summary, this has cut my workflow time by around 65%, and gives me better looking results. That to me, is well worth the money. Highly recommended.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
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by Rob Sylvan
by Adobe Creative Team
