Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 1.0

The release of Adobe’s $460 Lightroom follows an extended public beta program. It’s an unusual approach for the Photoshop maker, but it appears to have paid off, with the final product introducing some significant changes compared to the betas.

By Bruce Buckman / Monday, May 28 2007

Photo editing software
The release of Adobe’s $460 Lightroom follows an extended public beta program. It’s an unusual approach for the Photoshop maker, but it appears to have paid off, with the final product introducing some significant changes compared to the betas.

Lightroom is best described as doing for serious amateur and professional photographers what Photoshop Elements does for the casual digital photographer. It takes the high-end photography-specific tools of Photoshop and Adobe Camera RAW and distills them into a clean interface, while adding in a bunch of other tools that let you not just develop your photos, but manage them, print them, put them in slideshows and even publish them to the web.

Lightroom’s most noticeable feature is its interface, which differs from previous Adobe products. Lightroom presents a single window, without floating palettes or layered windows. The central area shows your image (or thumbnails if in the Library module), while around it are panels containing the various tools, which vary depending on the module. Toolsets can be collapsed or expanded by clicking Mac-style triangles, and you use a scroll bar to move up and down the left and right panels to access all the tools. If all this scrolling isn’t your thing, you can use “solo mode”, which displays just the active tool panel and collapses the others. Across the bottom is the filmstrip, which displays thumbnails of all the images in the current collection or folder.

The interface’s apparent simplicity shouldn’t lead you to assume Lightroom has a simplified toolset; there’s a wealth of power here that it’s easy to overlook at first, because it isn’t located in a conventional menu structure.

Lightroom is a non-destructive tool, meaning that any adjustments you make are not made to the image file itself, but held as meta data. It is not until you send a file to Photoshop or another external editor that your Lightroom adjustments are made permanent, and then it is always to a copy of the original file. While Lightroom is clearly targeted at photographers using RAW files, its non-destructive editing works with JPEGs, Tifs and Photoshop PSD files, and Adobe’s DNG format. (You get the option to copy your RAW files as DNG files if you wish when you import photos.)

You must first import photos into the Library before you can work on them. You can choose to move your imported files to a different folder, or work on them in their original location, which is likely to be the most popular option if you’ve got an existing folder structure containing thousands of images. Once you’ve got your photos in the library, you can create and add to “collections” of photos, which like the rest of Lightroom’s workflow, are virtual, so that the photos remain in their original folder locations. There’s a meta data browser, that lets you find images by camera type or lens type, for example (you can also apply meta data, such as copyright info, when you import files into Lightroom). You can also set up keyword tags and apply them to images.

From the Library module, you move to the develop module. Lightroom’s non-destructive editing means that you can create virtual copies of photos and work on these to create photo variations, instead of producing multiple, large-file size physical copies of files. Lightroom also keeps a complete history for the adjustments you make, so you can roll back variations to your heart’s content. You can save snapshots at any time, letting you bookmark crucial stages and jump back to them with a single click.

The program comes with a good assortment of presets (such as Direct Positive, Greyscale Conversion and Sepia Tone) which you can apply to get instant results, but you can create new presets at any time to save your favourite settings for future re-use. When you save presets you choose which adjustments currently active get saved into the preset, which allows you to exclude those settings which you don’t want factored in (such as white balance, for example).

Lightroom’s adjustment tools might throw off Photoshop users at first — you don’t adjust the tonal curve by tweaking the curve directly, for example — but once you’re acquainted with how things work they offer plenty of scope. Lightroom gives you two ways of adjusting the tone curve or making colour adjustments: you can either adjust the sliders or values directly or, more intuitively, use targeted adjustment. With targeted adjustment you click on an area of the image and then drag the mouse up or down to adjust the relevant values for colours or grey values matching the area under your mouse.

Lightroom includes basic sharpening and noise reduction tools, but they are not a substitute for more specialist tools found either in Photoshop or products like Neat Image. Likewise, while the program has effective tools for fixing chromatic aberration and lens vignetting, it lacks tools to fix barrel distortion.

With no support for layers, filters or many of the other tools Photoshop provides for sophisticated image tweaking, it’s clear that Lightroom will work best in concert with Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, rather than as a replacement for the external editor.

Lightroom’s print, slideshow and web modules provide a similar approach to the other modules. In each module you are presented with existing templates in the left panel, and tools for adjusting the result in the right module. You can then create custom templates based on your current settings. Again, the tools on offer are targeted at professionals, so you don’t get what consumer-level packages like to call “creative” effects. Instead, the emphasis is on tweaking tasteful starting points. Overall, Lightroom is a strong first generation product. It compliments rather than replaces Photoshop, and will likely replace Adobe Bridge and Camera RAW in many photographers’ workflow, while providing a core set of solid features in its other modules.

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