Photoshop Lightroom

Photoshop Lightroom seeks to fill a gap in the market that has been apparent for some time, both to professional digital photographers and to Adobe. And while it doesn’t do much that can’t already be done in Photoshop (on single images at least), for many photographers, Photoshop can be just way too much hassle when all that’s needed is a relatively minor adjustment.

Apple has already attempted to plug this gap with its version of a photo-centric image editor, Aperture, but shot itself in the foot with the decidedly lacklustre performance of the first incarnation of the program, which was disappointingly slow and buggy.

Photoshop Lightroom is neither slow nor particularly buggy, though still faces some competition from Apple’s updated Aperture, which has been significantly improved as of version 1.5.2. What Lightroom does offer is a similarly focused and slick editing environment designed more specifically around the needs of digital photographers, and it manages this rather well.

Improved looks
The first thing you’ll notice about Lightroom is the obvious departure from the Adobe ‘house style’ of interface design. Like Aperture, you get a single window with docked, slideable palettes, image browsers and utility panels surrounding a single working pane that displays either the current image or the contents of your working Library. The workflow and interface is split into sections, which can be selected from the top right of the interface. These are Library, Develop, Slideshow, Print and Web. Selecting one of these changes the interface, tool palettes and the main menu to suit a particular task.

File handling is important for photographers and Adobe has rightly opted for a flexible system. Aperture came under criticism for its Library scheme, which forced you to import all photos into a dedicated library space. Your library could only be as big as the disk on which it was stored. Apple has upgraded the design to allow file referencing, but Adobe is offering this straight away.

Along with simply storing a reference to the location of the imported image into your Library database, you can also choose two other options – Move, which physically moves the imported image to your central Lightroom library location, or Copy, which copies it there, leaving the original untouched. There is a fourth option, too, which makes a copy of the image and moves it to the Library, but converts it to a DNG file.

DNG stands for Digital Negative and is Adobe’s own file format, which it hopes will become a standard for digital photography. Unlike RAW files, DNG stores the metadata and image in a single file, which really simplifies archiving.

The core of the program is the Develop section. It’s here that you perform image correction or even get a bit creative. Lightroom is not really meant for creative image manipulation, but the sophisticated controls do let you warp colours and tones. It’s also designed to work on multiple images, so you can correct your whole shoot in one go.

The main editing tools are found to the right of the interface, and these are applied non-destructively to the opened RAW image. Lightroom stores these settings along with the uncorrected image in the Library database. While it does not apply them to the image pixels directly, you will see the corrected image in any of Lightroom’s file management views. At any time you can turn the settings on or off, but should you want to apply them you can simply export the image as a ‘flattened’ file in any of the supported formats (TIFF, JPEG or PSD).

Power and control
Control is very good. Lightroom offers all the tools you’d expect for correcting colour and tone. Nice features include the Recover slider, which lets you claw back overexposed highlights, and the Split Toning controls for Highlights and Shadows. But the feature to really shout about is Direct Adjust, which lets you edit the various colour and tone sliders and curves by clicking and dragging directly on the image. This makes editing very fast, since you don’t need to find and select the right sliders and drag them, which eliminates the need to take your eyes off the image.

Another great feature is the zoom. It’s simple; click on the image to zoom to 100 per cent, click-drag to pan and click again to fit it back to the view. It’s not as comprehensive as Aperture’s Loupe tool, but sometimes simplicity is best – and it certainly proves to be much faster.

Once editing is complete the three remaining rooms let you output your images in a variety of ways: as a Slideshow, prints or Flash and HTML web galleries. The Print room allows you to add a watermark and logo to the proof sheets.

By and large Lightroom’s performance is excellent. On a Mac Pro 2.66GHz machine, editing six-mega pixel files from a Canon 10D was nearly instantaneous, even on all combinations of tonal editing.