Software Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 1.0 (Win/Mac) [OLD VERSION]
Rating:  -
Adobe LightRoom is most definitely made for photographers.
This program has amazing organizational features for your giant photo library. Giving you the ability to add tags to your photos for idenitfication, to flag a photo or reject it completely, and also to rate a photo from 1 to 5 stars or by 5 different colors, allowing for incredible diversity when it comes to sorting, comparing and filing photographs.
A basic, but intuitive, development section gives you all the necessary Photoshop processing tools for tone adjustment, exposure, color, and more. This allows basic processing feature access without waiting for Photoshop to load. For more in-depth processing, you can open the photo with Photoshop right from the lightroom window, and it saves the results back to LightRoom.
Lightroom also includes a section for preparing your Photos for the web or for print.
As far as I'm concerned, this program is necessary for my work and is an incredible asset for any photographer with more than a few dozen files.
As far as some of the complaints I've read, many bugs have been worked out since it's inception as would be expected. Working with photographers, Adobe has released LightRoom 2 which offers many new processing and filing features.
Rating:  -
From reading some of the other reviews this product is one that you either love or hate. Yes the 300 USD. is rather steep as is the learning curve, it has helped me to arrange over 25,000 photos stored rather easily. Tagging and date arrangements, the powerful find function will let you sort by specific exif data like type of lens used or aperture or speed photo was shot as well as all the common find functions. Even incorporates geotagging, although because documentation is skimpy if you download the product from adobe, most knowledge breakthroughs come from the internet, where many people have made more gallery settings, web site settings, develop settings that you can add into Lightroom. Once the keyboard shortcuts are learned, cropping, straightening and so many other features become quite easy.
As an owner of photoshop cs3, find myself seldom opening photoshop, tweaking pictures within the develop module with great results with post processing. Buyers should be aware that Lightroom 2.0 beta is out and adds even more features and fine tunes many of the existing features from Lightroom 1.4. Lightroom 2.0 should be out in August of September of this year.
For me, the non-destructive editing is a space saver and picture file conserver of space, not ending up with multiple copies of the same picture each with their own adjustments.
Bottom line if you are willing to read the help columns and blogs and discussion groups on the internet as well as look at the help files on Adobe for learning and try and learn just a couple of things each day, there isn't much that this program will not do for you in categorizing, postprocessing, publishing via ftp for a web site. The only thing that stopped me from 5 stars is the 300 USD price tag, but i guess that is to cover all of the lost revenue to all the bootleg copies floating around.
If you are into photography, have a lot of photos that need organizing and tuning up, this program works very well. Converting raw files to most other image formats and allowing batch exporting, file renaming in a few clicks the task s done..
Rating:  -
This program is definitely NOT worth the nearly $300 price tag! It is full of bugs, and lacks functionality and flexibility. I'm really shocked that Adobe priced it this high. Because, the bottom line is that it does very little that any free or low cost photo organizer can't do, and it does nothing well, with the possible exception of providing the ability to save different revisions of a photo, without having to make a copy. (Is that function, alone, worth $300? -- It isn't, to me.
Besides the basic lack of usefullness, the program has some major flaws. For example:
There is no "undo" button. There is an Undo function in the Edit Menu, but the undo history is global, instead of having a separate undo history for each individual photo.
There are only two ways to save a slideshow: You can export to PDF; or you can have the program ftp it to your web site. There is no option to save it to your local drive, as html, so you can rename files and tweak it with your own html editor before sending it to your website. Also, even if you do send it to your web server, the software does not provide a blog capable option that is easy to implement.
Also, I went to a lot of trouble to create a preset in Develop mode, and applied it to a lot of photos in a collection. After I had all the photos the way I wanted them, I decided to try out the slide show creation tool, which, by the way, was not particularly impressive, with its very small number of templates, none of which was appealing to my eye. (There are plenty of "FREE" programs and online applications that will do a much better job at slideshow creation.
Anyway, after trying the 4 or 5 slide show types, I went back to Develop mode, and the preset I had created in Develop mode earlier was GONE! It simply disappeared! Then, to make matters worse, as soon as I returned to the collection where I had applied that preset earlier, it reverted all of the photos to a previous preset, right before my eyes! -- An obvious bug had wiped out 3 hours of work in 2 seconds! With no ability to "undo", since I didn't do it!
There was another bug, where the scrolling photo strip at the bottom would start scrolling really fast when you drap the slider with your mouse, but as soon as you let go of the mouse, it would jump back to where you started, kind of like a rubber band was attached. So, you ended up having to move the filmstrip to the left, one photo at a time, until the scroll bar worked again.
I wish I had listened to the previous reviewer who said this software was not worth the money. They were SOOO right! This software is not in the same class with other programs in this price range, and you do expect a LOT more out of software, when you pay this much for it!
If this software had been $40 or $50, I'd have said it was 'maybe' worth it. Don't these software companies realize that to most people $300 is a LOT of money!? I swear Adobe has got dollar signs tattoo'ed to the insides of their eyelids! Don't they realize that they've priced their software so high that the average consumer can't afford it? You'd think those geniouses would be better at math. They would make a much bigger profit, by pricing their software afordably, because they'd sell a lot more of it. I wish they would quit taking advantage of people the way Microsoft does! I mean, you gotta have an Operating System, so Microsoft kind of has the average consumer bent over a barrel, and they can and do charge exorbatent prices and get away with it, (I guess Gates can never have enough money!)
Well, take my word for it! You can definitely do without this over priced, buggy, not-ready-for-Prime-Time piece of software! Shame on Adobe for pricing it so high!
I wish I could return the product and get my money back! I feel like I was conned, because I expected more from the Adobe name, especially at this price!
If you need a reasonably priced photo editor, for Windows, check out Xara!
Rating: -
The several-day learning curve is worth it, even if you aren't a professional. Lightroom cut the time I spend sorting photos in a third.
It's well worth spending some time learning the keyboard shortcuts - check out the video tutorials on Adobe's site (even before you buy). They'll give you a sense of how you can speed up your workflow, and spend your time actually *taking* pictures, rather than fiddling with them after the fact.
Rating: -
If you're a professional photographer who needs to adjust multiple, similar photographs in terms of brightness, contrast, and hue- then this software is a gift from the gods.
For anyone else- people who want to edit one-off photos you took of your family during the last holiday, this software is pretty much pointless and FAR over-priced.
Thankfully we were smart enough to download the latest trial version from adobe before dropping hundreds of dollars on this dud. We stared at it for a while trying to figure out how to do a very simple edit and then gave up (BTW: I have 25 years in the IT industry and am pretty proficient with Photoshop).
Instead, I found a demo of a Photoshop-like program pre-installed on our computer (which costs only $60 to register) and tried to perform the same operation on the same photo. It took about 90 seconds.
Guess which one we'll be buying?
Just before trying both demo programs, I had a chat with a pro photographer (whose name I'll withhold because any decent pro photographer would know who he is, immediately), and he did not have anything positive to say about lightroom, suggesting Photoshop instead.
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