Adobe Lightroom

Lightroom 2.6

lightroom2

Adobe Lightroom

I have ben working with a program from Adobe called Lightroom, specifically version 2.6, and I am falling in love with it.

What is Lightroom?  According to Wikipedia: Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is  designed to assist professional photographers in managing thousands of digital images and doing post production work. It is not a file browser like Adobe Bridge, but rather an image management application database which helps in viewing, editing, and managing digital photos.

Some would also say it helps with the “workflow” of a photographer after they have taken their picture.  With digital images once you take the picture your job as a photographer may not be over, especially if it is not the best picture you have ever taken either technically or aesthetically.  After you get back to your secret Bat Cave and download your images from your camera, then what do you do?  Whatever  it is, including the download, is your workflow.  Mine used to be, more or less:

1. Download pics from memory card into Picasa 3.0

2.Add keywords to each one, like subject, name of the person (if it was a person), location, etc.

3.Delete any bad ones (that is always a tough one for me, as I tend to find something interesting in all pictures).

4.Edit the pictures by adding fill light, adjusting overall color, sharpen the image, red-eye removal, etc.

5.Upload some to the internet social sites like Facebook.

6.Export them to a portable drive.

7.Upload them to my personal photo gallery (this gives me two backup sites!)

Now, with Lightoom, it is about the same, but with a couple of minor modifications and a couple of major additions.  First, Lightroom does not actually ever make changes to your actual image “file.”  What it does is take all the changes you make and put them into a database.  Now, when you export that file, the changes are applied and you have your changes!  This does a few things, one of which is to keep hard disk space low.

Second, and for me, the biggest, is that my toolbox of editing tools has gotten much, much bigger...and better.  My  control over specific areas of my image is now dramatic.

Take a look at the picture below:

lightroom1

Notice the areas of Gray.  I can pinpoint or use a broad stroke in editing colors.  I made these changes gray so that they would stand out, but making them more subtly is really the key, think about making a girls lips reader, or her eyes greener!  You can adjust the tone of the picture, the contrast, the saturation of colors, the list goes on and on.  I can even adjust the exposure of specific areas of the images, like above.  Think of a picture of a person wearing a big hat and their face in the shade and is too dark.  You can use the tools to adjust just the face to make it brighter.

Third, Lightroom gives you tools to output your photos.  One of the tools allows you to specify the images and their sizes, then it will automatically lay them out on the paper for the best use of space!  Another output tool is for the web, it will help you make a slide show of your images. 

Fourth, it allows you to manage your actual files.  You can create virtual copies of an image where each can have different edits made to it and remember that because all the changes are saved to a database and not to the actual file, you did not use up any additional hard disk space (except for the database file which is relatively small.)  You can also “tag” your files with one or more of the following: stars, flags, and colors.  This allows you many ways to filter your selections later on.  Lets say you have a group of pictures and you tag the ones you like in blue, then you let your client tag the ones they like in green.  Now you can distinguish between the two tags when you go to view them later.

Fifth...well, the list is so long that I don’t want to take up the room here, but trust me there is a great deal you can do to improve your images with Adobe Lightroom.  

You can give it a try for free (for 30 days) HERE.