Ok… After using Lightroom 2 for a few days, I have some first thoughts and impressions.  Lightroom has some fantastic features and capabilities.  I think one of the most important features is that it will catalog all of your photos based on whatever keywords you may enter and the metadata present in the image file itself.  When you import photos into Lightroom, you have the option of adding or modifying any of the embedded metadata within the file.  These features allow you to find photos in your catalog quickly and easily with just a few keyword searches in most cases.  I don’t keep all of my photos online for extended periods of time.  I archive to DVD periodically.  A little forethought in this process also makes it easy to go back and add a keyword to a collection of files to tell me which DVD I archived to if I wish.  So, with this feature used properly, you should be able to find anything at any time with minimal hassle.  The database that Lightroom uses to accomplish this feat is rather large though.  With about 5500 photos in my current Lightroom database, the size of the database is about 380mb, so be prepared for that. 

The real attraction of Lightroom for me is for quick editing and processing of images.  When I shoot any particular event, I just need a quick way to browse the images, pick out the ones I want to edit, and do some brief and informal processing of those images.  Lightroom is perfect for this task.  I can make my tonality adjustments, color correction, crop if necessary, along with a host of other possibilities including some localized spot editing within the images, in a few short strokes of the mouse.  This workflow is VERY similar to the one I used when I actually shot my photos in the RAW mode and used Capture One to process them. 

Another secondary feature of Lightroom is that it will ultimately make you organize the way you store photos on your hard drive.  If you don’t do this, you will quickly have a rather large mess that is difficult to navigate within the program. I had a fairly streamlined process that worked for me in the past, but I further refined it for use with Lightroom to minimize the number of top-level file folders on my hard disk where I store photos. 

The process of importing photos into and exporting photos from Lightroom is more complex than I thought originally.  You have to pay very close attention to what you are doing in these procedures or your files won’t end up where you want them, they won’t be named properly, and they might have the wrong keywords associated with them.  The import and export modules in Lightroom remember your last setting, and will apply them to the current process automatically if you don’t change them.  Depending on the size of your monitor, you need to make sure you scroll the dialog box window to view ALL of the options that are part of the process.  I would love to see these dialog boxes designed where all of the information was displayed at once rather than having to scroll to see it all.  It’s easy to overlook something when it doesn’t appear before you on the screen. 

Lightroom is missing one feature that I really loved about the Capture One software I used in the past.  In Capture One, as I edited photos, I could add the individual photo to the ‘batch.’  The ‘batch’ was a list of photos that I wanted to process for further editing, printing, or whatever else I might want to do.  I could build this list as I worked.  I could also start processing the batch while I worked and continue adding files to it.  In Lightroom, this ‘batch’ isn’t built.  When you are finished with your editing, or ‘developing’ as it’s called in Lightroom, you have to go back to your Library view and individually select or ctrl+click select the group of files and then run the export process.

If I come across an image that needs additional editing in Photoshop, I can go straight from Lightroom to Photoshop, with my Lightroom modifications and continue editing.  This is an excellent feature. 

I have been using Lightroom for less than a week, so I’ll probably come back and write some more on this a little later. 

Art Photography, Product Review