I have designed and built my 75-page website, Heart of Stone Studio.com, all by myself. Every week, I post an average of fifty new gemstones to the site that are purchased by jewelry artists and collectors. Until recently, I was doing all the photography myself, which included editing of photos of stones to make sure that the depiction of each stone, especially color, was accurate.
I had thought that Photoshop was the ultimate photo editing program, until I saw Adobe Lightroom on my friend Doug Von Gausig's computer. Doug is a professional photographer (and also mayor of our neighboring town of Clarkdale, AZ), who takes thousands of photos every week and uses Lightroom to organize and edit them. When he showed me what Lightroom could do, I was immediately hooked. I went out and bought the program,then took a workshop to begin to better understand how to use it.
The Lightroom working screen is a very sexy black that you can make even more attractive by adding your own personalized logo and company name. Photographers do this because Lightroom is not just a behind-the-scenes type of program; it also can be used create and show very slick slide presentations, with music even, to clients. You can also use Lightroom to set up your photos on a web page. And of course, it's also helpful in preparing to print photos. So it's a real start-to-finish type of program.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. If you've read my previous posts about Adobe Bridge, you'll have an idea of what Lightroom can do because it does all of the things that Bridge does, except that photos have to be imported into Lightroom before you can work with them. (And, Lightroom is an independent program that you have to purchase separately.)
Like Bridge, Lightroom has a main work area with a "filmstrip" of smaller images running across the bottom, showing you everything that you have in a folder. Lightroom is different in that it has two main working modes: "Library" and "Develop." The Library mode is where you do the main importing, organizing, and exporting, although it also has some quick editing features.
But it's the Develop mode that's really neat: Switch to "Develop," and Lightroom presents you with the same main viewing area, only now you get an expandable column on your right. This is where you can easily access and adjust all the main aspects of a photo--tint, temperature, exposure, white balance, color, brightness, contrast, saturation, clarity, etc.--just by scrolling up and down and using your mouse to move a point along each slider (scale). You can even select individual colors and instantly adjust them to your liking.
Like Photoshop, Lightroom has a tone curve, that infamous graph with the diagonal line across it. In my opinion, Lightroom's tone curve is more user-friendly--Once you've got it open, you can click and hold on any area of the photo and, using your mouse, "slide" the cursor up or down right on the image to lighten or darken all the tones matching that of the area you've selected. If you want to fine-tune your changes, you can then go over to the sliders in the right column and adjust them individually. You can adjust color and contrast in the same way. In Lightroom 2, you can even replace a washed-out sky using a graduated filter that is easily adjustable. The only thing you can't do is outline (isolate) and select an area of an image to change--That you would have to do in Photoshop. And, as mentioned before, Lightroom doesn't do layers.
But as I don't work often with layers, I'm enchanted with Lightroom. What's really neat is that Lightroom enables you to set up your "before" and "after" images in a split screen so you can compare what you've changed with the original. The left (history) column on the screen keeps track of every change you make, so if you don't like it, you can click on an earlier step to undo a certain change.
The thing I like best about Lightroom is that it allows you to make changes to multiple images at once. You can do this two ways. One is by the Copy and Paste buttons: Say you have a dozen photos that you shot indoors, all of which need to be lightened and have their white balance corrected so that they're not all greenish from the overhead flourescent lighting. You can select one representative photo, correct the white balance with a single click, make your other adjustments, then hit the "Copy" button, which makes a complete copy of your changes. You can then select one, some or all of the other photos and hit the "Paste" button, and they'll all instantly be adjusted exactly the same way.
Another way to do this is to pre-select all the similar problem photos by highlighting them, make your changes on one photo, then click the "Sync" button, and all will be immediately synchronized and adjusted the same way. Can you imagine how this will speed up your work flow? It's fabulous!
The main thing that makes Lightroom responsive and just plain fast is that, believe it or not, even though you've imported your photos into Lightroom, it's not your actual photos that you see on the Lightroom screen. They're not really sitting backstage in the program. They're virtual! And all the editing changes you make in Lightroom, well, they're virtual, too. They're just a set of instructions that Lightroom saves and assigns to that particular photo file. This is so cool because it means that even though you have tons of photos copied into Lightroom, because they're only data files, not real photos, they take up hardly any room on your computer.
That means that, despite what you do inside Lightroom, your original photos--be they jpegs, tiffs, or even Raw images--are sitting untouched in another folder on your computer. The virtual changes that you make in Lightroom become real when you go back to the "Library" mode and hit "Export." Then you're presented with dialogue boxes that allow you to save your changed virtual photos as real .jpg, .tiff, or .xmp files for Camera Raw photos, and you can assign them new file names if you want, or over-write and change your existing jpg and tiff photo files. So when you're done with the Export, you can close out Lightroom and go to your target folder and there are your photos, all cleaned up, corrected, and perfect.
The capabilities I've mentioned here are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what Lightroom can do. Again, this program is not for someone who just wants to print quick pix for the family photo album. But it is a wonderful new tool for those of us who have lots of photos to review and adjust. If it's something you're interested in, I suggest dropping by Adobe.com, where you can sign up for a free 30-day trial download.
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