Adobe Lightroom 2
Adobe Lightroom 2 gets my Blue Ribbon for Excellence, Lightroom 2 is a great productivity and image processing suite that makes repetitive jobs working with images and pictures easy.
Ease of Use, Performance: 24/25, Look & Feel: 24/25,
Features 24/25, How much I enjoy 25/25
Total: 97/100
This was my first introduction to Lightroom so I cannot compare the differences of the first version and Lightroom 2 seems to be such a fantastic product to begin with. Lightroom is a fantastic digital image processor and database management tool; you can edit pictures as well as manipulate whole groups of pictures with the same filters, resolution and other fixes.
Lightroom’s main focus is editing pictures in the RAW format so your original high quality images that come directly from your camera can be used for other editing without having to worry about the things you changed for one image. RAW is the format cameras use for the highest quality but also highest file size of image storing so you have the best image to start your editing on.
This is to me one of the best features of Lightroom and the second version Lightroom 2; image editing using the original unprocessed file straight from your camera. You can start with all the various settings; light balance, color, exposure and change them how you want from the beginning of your image editing.
Using the RAW format means you can edit a picture and save it, print it or copy to a file to give away and still have the picture as well as the original in one file. Lightroom and Lightroom 2 is a non-destructive image editor which means it saves the original and the information of your edit automatically.
This process is actually very interesting and maybe a bit confusing so I will explain; when you take a picture it is saved as a digital file. This information has to be processed into the JPEG, TIFF or other formats in order to see your picture but with the RAW format you can add information to the file while still in RAW.
When you do things to a JPEG or TIFF image you change the picture or alter the information of the digital format forever, but not with RAW formats and Lightroom. A program like Photoshop may save the information for later removal or changing but the actual image has been forever altered and you have to live with the changes unless you go to the same computer and program to reverse those changes.
With Lightroom and RAW formats you have the original picture saved in the RAW format and anything you do to the image is saved as add-ons to the RAW format. The original image format is still there but Lightroom saves changes to an image or even groups of images as little files that are tagged and added on to the image.
These add-ons which can include group information, catalog files and organizing information can be added, changed or removed at any time with the same RAW image file. This means years down the road the original and any changes will still be there so you can do or undo things that were done before.
This is not like saving a copy of the original and copies of an edited image, this is the original RAW format and any changes made to it as well as organizer and catalog information added to the image file. One way to help you understand this; think of a picture as a folder with a page as the original image and any image editing and add-ons as sticky notes stuck to the image that says how the image has been altered.