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Adobe Photoshop Lightroom

Page history last edited by Ariana Berdy 9 years, 2 months ago

Adobe Lightroom Review

by Ariana Berdy

Description

Adobe Lightroom is a non-destructive photo-editing software.

Lightroom is not a file managing program, and therefore files must be imported into the library before they can be edited. The Library allows users to import, export, create collections, organize, and rate photos. The Develop setting allows users to edit a large amount of photos at a time and offers a variety of photo retouching options. Additionally Lightroom offers Map, Book, Slideshow, Print, and Web functionality that deals with distributing your images.

Lightroom comes as a single program (see Access for more info) and runs independently. Lightroom is highly customizable and supports additional plug-ins.

From the original tool review: "Also, it has the capability to allow you to share images or directly export them to social media platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook. However some of the tools are limited in their functionality compared to Photoshop such as the Clone and Heal tools.

Additional Features

Imaging Watermarking
Online sharing integration
More flexible print packages
Produce slideshows"

Access

Adobe's Creative Cloud offers many ways to get this software. The entire cloud package is advertised to be as low as $29.99/month. The cloud catalog has a "buy now" option and Lightroom is listed under the Photography plan for $9.99/ month and it comes with the latest version of Photoshop. Photoshop is not required to use Lightroom. Lightroom was previously offered as a standalone software that can still (as of February 2015) be purchased at the student price for $78.99 at the UTD bookstore.

Once you have bought or downloaded the tool it is located in your programs/ applications. It is available for both Windows and Mac. If you are a Linux or other user research your software compatibility options.

Sample Usage

Photo taken by Ariana Berdy on August 10, 2014 at the Cavanaugh Flight Museum.

Tips, tricks, and tutorials

Lightroom offers tons of opportunities for customization, such as "identity plates" which display custom text in the upper left hand side of the program. Users can also save watermark images or text and save them as presets to be used to be automatically applied when exporting. When importing images the photographs can be batch edited upon import to a custom setting. Etc.

Lightroom will remember photographs that you have imported even after you move or delete them from their original file location. These photos are still editable. This is especially nice when working on photos from an external hard drive as the edits can be synched to apply.

Lightroom will offer to create backups every time you close it. These backups create a new file each time and are labeled with the date they were created.

Certain helpful hotkeys: "L" will fade out the sidebars so that you can view your photos more closely and without distraction. The sidebars are still live. Holding down "alt" while using a editing slider will show a more focused view of what it is you are editing.

For more detailed info please seek out tutorials and info videos such as http://kelbyone.com/100ways/

What the Tool Does Well

Edit a large number of photos in a variety of ways. The customization options allow the photo editing process to go very quickly. Because this program does a variety of things very well, it is hard to name a few highlights that are better than the rest.

What it Does Poorly

Images must be imported into the library before they can be edited.

Lightroom is not capable of creating non-photographic images (such as drawings), and offers very limited editing of those images. Lightroom also cannot render text or 3D objects.

For the most part, Lightroom does not slow down significantly when background programs are running. However if applications such as video, music, or other large processing programs (such as Photoshop) are functioning then Lightroom will start to lag, especially when importing or exporting.

What happens when you...

Lightroom is actually pretty good at editing flat images such as digital paintings. The "highlights", "shadows", "whites", and "blacks" are particularly successful at being manipulated in this case. However, the same result could probably be achieved much more successfully using Curves and Levels in Photoshop.