Digital Photographer's Software Guide - Bertemes - Net

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Adobe Lightroom is a classic workflow tool for many, but not all photographers. It is
superb for browsing, examining, comparing, and organizing your images as well as for
carrying out global processing tasks, in batches or individually. If you have hundreds of
photographs from each shoot and need to submit several dozen to your client, it could
be the tool for you. If you need to work on one or two selected images in detail or prepare
professional-level slide shows and Web pages, you will need many other tools as
well. Continued development of Lightroom has added facilities for multi-computer
workflows, making it suitable for use by large studios. Lightroom now has folder
synchronization, improved sharpening, better noise reduction, and multiple monitor
support—all further indications that Adobe aims to make this product the tool of choice
for serious photographers.
Version: Adobe Lightroom 2.0 (2008)
OS: Windows XP with SP2 and Vista; Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5
RAM: 1GB recommended
Supported file formats: More than 140 RAW formats; JPEG, TIFF, and DNG
Price level: Approx. $300
Address: Adobe Systems Incorporated, 345 Park Avenue, San Jose, CA 95110-2704, United States
www.adobe.com
Featured Product: Aperture
Chapter 38 ■ Two Featured Products 439
Vendor: Apple, Inc.
Purpose: Sorts, compares, selects, processes, edits, prints, and publishes digital images on a Mac
Description
Apple’s Aperture is an all-in-one digital image-management system aimed at professional,
enthusiast, and aspiring photographers who are attracted by its hundreds of postproduction
features. Although it runs only on Macintosh, it does much the same as
Adobe Lightroom and carries out major functions in a broadly similar way. For example,
it offers non-destructive editing; preserves an untouched master file; requires no manual
saving of adjustments; and lets you store the images anywhere you choose.
Yet in its organizing ability, Aperture goes even further than Lightroom, making it ideal
for event and sports photographers who take thousands of shots on every project. It has
an incomparable set of features for examining, comparing, rating, ranking, and selecting
images. Among all these features, each user is likely to find one or two favorite techniques.
It is hard to believe that anyone could use them all, but they form a compelling reason
for buying this software if you are a Mac user.