Adobe Lightroom for amateurs and pros alike

[smilodon]

I posted this up on another forum as part of a thread about how suitable Adobe Lightroom might be for amateur photographers. It might be useful for some of our keen photography enthusiasts.

Since it was released Adobe Lightroom (LR) has been aimed firmly at professional photographers. As a tool for managing vast image libraries and efficiently processing large numbers of images it's unsurpassed IMHO. But it's clearly been targeted at professionals and at £200 is priced accordingly. However when Adobe released the latest version 4 of the program they cut the price in half. In fact a quick look on Amazon shows it's available in the UK for £90.00. So potentially it now falls into a price range where keen amateurs might be interested. Also as Photoshop currently costs well over £600 Lightroom could well serve as a main photo editor as well.

At it's heart LR is four tools rolled into one application and one interface. It allows you import images into it's catalogue, sort and organises those images, perform a range of powerful editing functions and finally export the results. It's a complete photographic workflow tool and while it's designed to deal with tens of thousand or even hundreds of thousands of images it works very well at any scale of use.

So LR allows you to import photos from your hard drive, network drives and directly off camera memory cards. It lets you rename, tag, and group images in meaningful ways thay allow you to quickly locate them across your PC, drives and network. It lets you make powerful edits to the pictures and correct all manner of problems and faults. And it lets you export images to a number of file formats, locations on your PC, into a web galleries, to print or even to music accompanied slide shows if you want.

Rather than go through an exhaustive list of features and functions I'll mention a few key features that really make working with LR a joy.

1. Non destructive editing. Lightroom works without actually touching your photographs. This might sound odd but at no point does LR ever do anything permanent to your images. It works by adding each edit you make to a database list for the specific image. While it will instantly show you the effect of the edit or your picture it's not actually touching the underlying pixels. You can make dozens of changes to an image and be safe in the knowledge that nothing you do could ruin or damage it. Only when you choose to export an image does LR apply the edits and create a new copy of you photograph.

2. Collections. While your actual pictures exist on your hard drive as single files and within single folders LR can add them to any number of 'collections'. A collection is a set of images collected together by you into an organised group. They appear to work much like a folder but there are no duplicates made. A picture of a  church on a hill could exist in a collection called 'buildings' and also one called 'landscapes'. Both collections reference a single image on your hard drive.

3. Virtual copies. As mentioned LR doesn't actually touch the underlying image when you make changes to it. Only when you're ready to export the image does LR 'bake' the changes into a new image. You can actually have more than one set of edits listed for each image. You can create a virtual copy of a single picture and perform changes to it. You can the go back to the original and create a new virtual copy and perform a different set of edits. This is a very powerful tool and so here's an example of how it might be used.

I have a picture of a friend ready to be edited. I make a virtual copy and can now see two identical images side by side in LR. I can edit one as a colour picture and the second as a black and white. I can keep the copies all together or move individual virtual copies into different collections as it the were distinct pictures. All the time the original image sits untouched on my hard drive yet I can make as many virtual copies as I like.

There's a huge amount of different features and functions that include excellent noise reduction to get rid of the grain that might creep into our images, powerful tone controls, colour adjustments, local adjustments that allow you to work on different parts of an image selectively, spot and blemish removing tools, powerful key-wording, a huge library of pre-set visual effects from the Adobe community, lots of pre-made web galleries (my whole photography web site is built in Lightroom), the ability to manage video clips and so much more.

However LR is a photography tool so it has no real graphic design features. There's no ability to add text, cut out element from one image and combine them with a second or use layers, masks and many of the standard features found in Photoshop. LR is a photographers tool for working on complete photographs.

In the past I would never have suggested LR to anyone who is not either a professional or a very keen amateurs that takes lots and lots of images. But at ninety quid LR might well be something that many more casual photographers could be interested in. We seem to live with cameras in our pockets now and the number of family and holiday pictures we take can quickly run to thousands of images. So even if we don't do a lot of editing LR's ability to manage an ever growling collection of precious photographs could be worth the investment.

You can download a free one month trial from Adobe. As mentioned LR doesn't actually touch your images so you can't really break anything if you do take it for a whirl. If you find LR isn't for you just uninstall it and your pictures will be exactly where you left them.

And while I'm regretting saying this as I type I've been using LR for years and so if someone does take the plunge feel free to ping me with any questions or concerns.

Link to download