Digital Photographer's Software Guide - Bertemes - Net

Chapter 38 ■ Two Featured Products 435
Lightroom’s initial lack of retouching and image-editing tools was overcome by the simple
expedient of Ctrl/Command+E, which places all the current settings for a particular
photograph into a TIFF file, which then opens automatically in Photoshop for further
editing. This is still the correct way to do it, although now, with the latest version of
Lightroom (2.0 beta is being used for this review), there is a magic retouch brush icon,
which, on being clicked, opens a sub-panel with mask, paint, and brush tools. These
are a wonderful addition to Lightroom. For example, being able to paint areas of the
image with plus or minus exposure is a feature that many photographers will quickly
find indispensable.
Spot, cropping, and red-eye removal controls have been placed prominently alongside the
brush icon for instant access, and these also open up sub-panels with their respective tools.
It is worth noting that among the tools in the cropping sub-panel are the all-important
Straighten slider and detachable Straighten tool. It is very easy to forget where these have
been hidden if you are in the habit of straightening horizons without cropping the image.
It is a fair question to ask—does the average amateur photographer or even a professional
who takes just a few images per day really need Adobe Lightroom, given its
remarkable ability to handle thousands of images, cycle through them at speed, and
apply adjustments to whole groups of similar photographs with a single “synchronize”
command? Probably not, but then, most people possess at least a few tools—whether
in the kitchen, the study, or the workshop—that rarely get used to their full extent. If
you take a hundred pictures on holiday once a year, you may still find Lightroom irresistible
when you see how ingeniously it slides its control panels in and out of view to
cater for wide or standard screen sizes, how these in turn are stretchable to increase resolution
on the slider controls, and how the program “dims the lights” on everything
except the displayed image so you can examine your work more closely.
For the wedding or events photographer who often shoots 2,000 images that need to
be whittled down to 50, Lightroom is the obvious solution. It divides the workflow into
logical groupings: Library, Develop, Slide Show, Print, and Web.
Library
The program starts and finishes in the Library, where you have access to all your photographs,
even those stored outside the managed confines of the Library itself. The
Import button takes you immediately to the last-opened folder in your hard disk, a good
example of Lightroom’s direct approach to most tasks. When you bring in your images
you can choose whether you want to use previews embedded in them or let Lightroom
make its own. This use of 1:1 previews is one of the key concepts underpinning many
of the high-speed operations in the program. To conserve resources you do not need to
keep them forever. In the Preferences menu you have the option of determining how
long the program keeps them in the preview cache (one day/week/month or always).
The default setting is 30 days.