Let me start by saying that Adobe has not paid me for this review. But if Adobe wants to send me any money I have no problem with that.

I’ve been working with Adobe Lightroom 2.6 and this is the most excited I’ve been about software in a long time. I’m gonna write about some of the things I like about Lightroom. Show you some examples of things I’ve done with Lightroom. Then talk about what’s wrong with Lightroom. I’ll also have some links in here which will open examples and screen shots in another window/tab of your browser. None of these images are high art or anything mind you – just examples so you can see what the software does.

The good stuff.

Unlike Photoshop, which has functions and abilities which are interesting but not the sorts of things I typically do with photographs, Lightroom is simplistic, but simplistic in a good way. Working with Lightroom is very much like working in the darkroom. It allows me to do the things I want to do with my photographs and I don’t have to sort through menus of functions I’ll never use. Lightroom has five modules and I’ll briefly cover what each module does.

1. The library module.

This module allows you to organize your photographs. It presents three ways of organizing your photos. Those are catalogues, folders and collections. When I first started working with Lightroom this confused me to no end. I really didn’t think I was going to get how this worked and it was annoying. However now that I’ve read a couple of books on Lightroom and experimented with the program I understand how these things function and I have to say I like it a lot. You can place an image in any or multiple collection while they remain in the original folder. Additionally doing this does not create an addition copy of the image file. Lightroom works on via a XML data file that stores the information regarding how your image is modified, not on the image itself. Thus multiple copies/modification of an image do not use up very much additional disk space.

A catalogues is a collection of folders and collections. Many things I’ve read on Lightroom suggest only having one catalogue. I can see this as a good idea, though in my case I have multiple catalogues because I have some images that are stored on my Linux drives. Those are read-only from Windows, so I keep them in a different catalogue. You can also create catalogues for individual external drives. I can see myself doing this sometime in the future.

Once I understood how the library module works I found it to be fantastic. I also like the quick developed which allows me to quickly change exposure, recovery, fill light, contrast and other aspects of the photo in order to see if a photo can be salvaged or if it just needs be dumped. There are more precise tools for modifying the image in the develop module, so I just use the tools in the library module for sorting the good from the bad from the ugly.

Screen shot of Lightroom library module.

The library module allows you to rate your files and has colour codes, a five star rating system and a black/white/no flag system. The library module also allows you to sort your photos based on these ratings which adds another level of organizational ability. Quick sorting for me means going through a batch of photos, black flagging all the bad ones, then viewing all the black flag photos, giving them a second look in case some might be good, then deleting them. I can then go back to the unflagged photos and get to work on the good stuff.

Lightroom also supports keywording. So far I have not used this function and while I can see how it could be useful, I’m not really sure it’s useful for me because I do my organizing with the folder hierarchy on the hard drive. I’m also not going to go back in time and keyword thousands of images from the last 10 years. Just not happening. But if keywording is your thing or if you are starting fresh then this will definitely work for you.

I should also mention that Lightroom supports dual monitors. This makes it really easy to work with. I can have the grid of multiple photographs on one monitor and on the other monitor have a close up of the photograph I’m examining at any given moment.

2. The develop module.

The develop module is where you make the modifications to your photograph and does all obvious things you might expect such as allow you to change colours, exposure, tone, modify histograms, sharpening, noise reduction, fix red eye and all those sorts of things. But here are the tools that are really impressive in the develop module.

First there’s the crop tool which does your standard cropping but it also allows you to rotate your image. Cropping a photograph is nothing new but the way Lightroom handles cropping makes it very easy to use.

Screen shot of Lightroom develop module crop tool.

He graduated filter tool is in my opinion one of the very coolest things in Lightroom. If you are a film photographer then you probably know what a graduated filter is and what it’s used for. Lightroom allows you to apply the very same effect to your photos but in addition to simply controlling exposure or colouration as you can do with a real graduated filter in front of your lens the Lightroom graduated filter allows you to adjust practically any aspect of the photograph. This will end up being one of the features of Lightroom I use the most.

Screen shot of Lightroom develop module graduated filter tool.

The adjustment brush allows you to make changes to the exposure, brightness, contrast, saturation, clarity, sharpness and any combination of those attributes to an image in a specific location. The really nice thing I discovered about this is that if you utilize the auto mask function the adjustment brush will make the changes only to areas that match where you started making the adjustment at. So if your brightening up the iris of an eye this will prevent the brightening from extending to the white of the eye. Very very cool.

Then there is the spot removal tool which can be used to either heal or clone in order to fix blemishes on your photographs. It’s doubly easy to do this because when you select the blemish to be corrected Lightroom automatically seeks out an area in the photograph that matches the area surrounding the blemish and corrects it for you with that data. You can of course override Lightroom’s selection but so far Lightroom has made good choices in my experience.

3. The slideshow module.

The next module is the slideshow module. This is the module I personally see as being the most useless. It allows you to set up a slideshow of images and play an audio file on your computer. If showing people a slideshow of your photography on your computer is something you do this is probably pretty nice. Since I don’t do this I don’t have much use for it. The slideshow function does allow you to export your slides as either individual JPEG images or as a PDF file. The PDF file can be set up so that it will go into full screen and automatically and begin playing the presentation but at this time you cannot adjust the interval each slide is shown nor can you export your audio with your slideshow. With the JPEG export you could then rebuild your slideshow with Powerpoint or similar software.

A Lightroom slideshow saved in PDF format.

4. The print module.

I thought I wasn’t going to have a lot to say about the print module because I don’t currently have a printer so I’m not doing my own printing. Then I discovered the contact sheet function of the print module and this is gonna be way too much fun for me.

JPG image of a Lightroom contact sheet 3 vertical arrangement.

PDF image of a Lightroom contact sheet 3 vertical arrangement.

PDF image of a Lightroom contact sheet 4 horizontal arrangement.

In addition to the contact sheets you can also set up picture packages. You can for example set up to print one 4 x 6 image and six 2 x 3 images on one sheet. As with pretty much everything in light room you can create your own custom templates based on your paper size and image size.

Screen shot of Lightroom print module.

Both your picture packages and your contact sheets can be printed to files so you can save them as JPEG or PDF files for printing and/or distribution.

5. The web module.

The web module allows you to create HTML, Airtight, or Flash photo galleries. Being as I drop my photographs into my Zen image gallery here on the website I have not used this extensively yet but I will say that I do like the airtight simple viewer and airtight postcard viewer as potential galleries. The links below will direct you to a sample of each of those.

I’m not a fan of flash. I know most people think it’s cool, but the use of flash is the number one reason why I leave any given website. No, I’m not going to upgrade my flash and restart my browser just to view your flash gallery. But that’s another topic for the future.

A postcard Airtight gallery, my favourite of the available galleries in Lightroom.

A simple Airtight gallery.

A Flash gallery in a yellow theme.

If you’re going to use the web module to regularly post your images on your website it even allows you to upload the gallery to your website directly from Lightroom. You can also export the gallery you’ve created to a folder for manual uploading. Likewise you can use the export function to create a gallery on your hard drive, or on a CD/DVD.

Overall light room is deceptively simple. When I first started using it I didn’t like it that much. Then I went to the library and got some books on how to use Lightroom. After going through two of those books page by page, following the directions and doing the experimenting I have definitely found a passion for what this software can do. Up until now I’ve done almost all of my photo editing, which I should say hasn’t been a whole lot, using the open source program GIMP. I’ve Photoshop as well, but to a lesser degree.

Lightroom was, as compared to Photoshop, easier to learn in a short period of time and allows me to do the things I want to do without having to work around a bunch of added functionality that doesn’t help me.

So what’s wrong with Adobe Lightroom.

For the most part not much. I would like to see some additional options in the slideshow, print and web modules. There are small aspects in each of those which I think it would be nice to be able to customize such as a bit more control of text and layout.

The really important one I’d like to see is the ability to export a slideshow as a single self-contained executable file that takes all of your settings to include audio with it. You should be able to double-click that file and it should start up, assume full screen mode, and begin showing your slideshow and playing audio. Come on Adobe, this is not that hard to do.

The biggest flaw Lightroom has is that it’s written by computer programmers were trying to make a profit. Why is this a flaw you ask? Simple. In order to make a profit selling Lightroom Adobe has to release new editions of Lightroom on a regular basis. In order to release a new edition and get people who already have Lightroom to buy a new release they have to add features and functions in order to entice them. At some point Adobe will start adding features and functions which are going to distract from the simplicity of Lightroom and eventually Lightroom will turn into another version of Photoshop. It will have a gazillion layers of menu items that nobody ever uses and fewer people even understand.

Add to this the fact that most software designers think that changing their software is both good and necessary. An equivalent example of this in the open source world is the KDE environment for Linux. KDE 3.5 was fantastic and two of its applications, Amarok and K3B (a music manager and a CD/DVD burner) were two of the best Linux applications out there. KDE then released version 4.0 which is a complete piece of crap and both Amarok and K3B version 4.0 releases are, quite literally, unusable. K3B will no longer even burn double layer DVDs and will only burn a single layer DVD if you first create an iso image and then burn the iso image to the DVD. Just pathetic. Bust software people don’t know how to leave that which works alone.

It’s inevitable that sometime in the future Lightroom will be destroyed by the very people who created it. In their quest to push a new version out the door with more bells and whistles they will change things simply because change is equated with progress. But for right now this is a fantastic piece of software and if you are going to be working with photographs on your computer I highly recommend getting some of this before it goes bad.