Adobe Lightroom mini-review

I have downloaded the trial version of Adobe Lightroom 1.0 and I must say that I am highly impressed. For those of you who don’t know: Lightroom is a brand new, highly specialized Adobe application for photographers - complex RAW processor and photo collection organizer. Adobe was running a beta program for more than a year, asking photographers from all around the word to participate in testing and this really worked out well, giving us mature and very sophisticated software product. I have not tried betas as I don’t believe in them (for most of the time they do not really perform well, and I am not a martyr so I prefer the stable, finished programs). The more I am happy now - it looks like Lightroom is exactly what I was waiting for.

Adobe Bridge + ACR and Photoshop is a great combination. It gives you everything, except good collection management (Bridge features are far from being useful, and the sluggishness of this application is just beyond any imagination :). But it’s also… too complex sometimes. Jumping between three programs requires a lot of patience, time and memory - none of things I have. Lightroom is like Photoshop stripped down from all the functions I don’t need, combined with faster and more advanced Bridge and hugely expanded Camera Raw. All of this in a nice, flexible interface. Cool.

What kicked my balls in the first instance? Speed. I was expecting it to be sloooow. That was the conclusion of beta testers; slowness. Well, these guys in Adobe Labs did their job pretty well. Ok - it’s not the best product ever, but just now I am after importing more than 1000 of 6mpix photos in dng and mrw format, some photo manipulation, rating, filtering and other things and application still works very efficiently on my 1.8 P4 Centrino notebook with just a gig of ram memory. Pretty cool. Image import is blazing fast; after my bad experience with Bridge importing few hundreds of photos and complete machine lockup I was afraid to try the same, but there was no reason for that! New Adobe’s baby performed really well. Another thing I really love is the way you can jump back and forth over the RAW manipulation history and different states you were applying on the way. Try working with compare view - this is fantastic! Or just dim the lights (search for it and you’ll find out what that means ;) Last but not least: fantastic photo management options. Collections, keywords, tagging, everything done very simple and nice way - even monkey like me can understand it without any doubt :)

This application has everything I need and most of the things a serious photographer could ever ask for. It cost around 160 Pounds and I am sure I will buy it in the near future. A true gem; kudos, Adobe. You rule as usual. I am highly impressed. It looks to me like I won’t be even thinking about launching Photoshop for a long, long time (unless I’ll be digging in some freelance or very advanced photo retouching).

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