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Lightroom is a ground breaking professional workflow environment, designed to cover the whole process from capturing and cataloguing your files, to editing then converting from RAW, right up to inkjet printing or making slide shows or even designing and publishing web pages. It will even upload the web pages. The software also places a great deal of importance on preserving your original RAW image, saving variations as sets of instructions rather than TIFs or JPEGS. Apart from saving disk space this also means that all steps, even cropping, can be undone - next week, next year, anytime !! It’s hard to over stress just how useful that is. How many times have you looked at an image the next day and wanted to make it just a little bit more or less ...whatever. With Lightroom you can go back and just adjust whatever you like - the original settings are all still there. Even cropping. It’s amazing.
Incidentally Lightroom doesn’t just deal with RAW files - you can import and work on any type of image file you like. The nearest real competitors to Adobe Lightroom are Apple Aperture which has the same aims and many of the same features, and ACDSee which has some of the features but not the well thought out workflow of the other two. Although Adobe Lightroom and Apple Aperture will appeal to a large audience, they are both aimed at the professional market, where dealing with large numbers of images quickly and efficiently is vital. Many professionals, including me, now spend far more time in front of a computer, than behind a camera, so anything that speeds up the processing of our images is very welcome.
Unfortunately Lightroom 1 didn’t entirely deliver on the promise, being in my experience slow to learn and even slower in use. It also had a surprising number of bugs and quirks. Now with Lightroom 2 there is a gradual improvement and many added features. Some of these are unique - In particular the ability to work selectively on RAW files BEFORE conversion. This allows you to make selective adjustments to color, contrast, etc on small areas of an image before exporting a TIF to Photoshop. Although you can actually do all of this in Photoshop now using masks, this time Lightroom is by far the faster option.
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