Product DescriptionAdobe Photoshop Lightroom is the professional photographer's essential toolbox. It provides you with one easy application for managing, adjusting, and presenting large volumes of digital photographs. Enjoy an elegant, uncluttered interface that eases the learning curve and helps you get productive quickly. Fine-tune your photographs with precise, easy-to-use tools for globally correcting White balance, exposure, tone curves, lens distortion, and Color casts. Task-oriented modules whisk you through typical workflow tasks by putting just the tools you need at your fingertips. Spend less time in front of the computer and more time behind the lens. Edit large numbers of images faster, by creating presets you can apply to many photographs at once -- or edit one image and then synchronize your adjustments to other photos Retrace your adjustments to any image & return to any state of the photo that you choose, with explicit history tracking Erase dust spots from an image with a single click Quickly and visually format high-quality prints -- recall your favorite layouts with saved presets and enjoy speedy output, even with large files Preview the results of your HTML or Adobe Flash based Web galleries - Perform nondestructive editing - Adjustments to images in Lightroom won't alter the original data
- Task-oriented modules whisk you through typical workflow tasks by putting just the tools you need at your fingertips
- Precise, easy-to-use tools for globally correcting white balance, exposure, tone curves, lens distortion, and color casts
- Robust support for more than 150 camera raw formats - JPEG, TIFF, DNG, camera raw files & more
- Fast zooming - Check sharpness, noise, or small details with nearly instant zooming
- Format: CD-ROM
- Release Date: 2007-02-19
Customer ReviewsReviewed on 2008-05-17  
Rather Steep Learning Curve....
From reading some of the other reviews this product is one that you either love or hate. Yes the 300 USD. is rather steep as is the learning curve, it has helped me to arrange over 25,000 photos stored rather easily. Tagging and date arrangements, the powerful find function will let you sort by specific exif data like type of lens used or aperture or speed photo was shot as well as all the common find functions. Even incorporates geotagging, although because documentation is skimpy if you download the product from adobe, most knowledge breakthroughs come from the internet, where many people have made more gallery settings, web site settings, develop settings that you can add into Lightroom. Once the keyboard shortcuts are learned, cropping, straightening and so many other features become quite easy.
As an owner of photoshop cs3, find myself seldom opening photoshop, tweaking pictures within the develop module with great results with post processing. Buyers should be aware that Lightroom 2.0 beta is out and adds even more features and fine tunes many of the existing features from Lightroom 1.4. Lightroom 2.0 should be out in August of September of this year.
For me, the non-destructive editing is a space saver and picture file conserver of space, not ending up with multiple copies of the same picture each with their own adjustments.
Bottom line if you are willing to read the help columns and blogs and discussion groups on the internet as well as look at the help files on Adobe for learning and try and learn just a couple of things each day, there isn't much that this program will not do for you in categorizing, postprocessing, publishing via ftp for a web site. The only thing that stopped me from 5 stars is the 300 USD price tag, but i guess that is to cover all of the lost revenue to all the bootleg copies floating around.
If you are into photography, have a lot of photos that need organizing and tuning up, this program works very well. Converting raw files to most other image formats and allowing batch exporting, file renaming in a few clicks the task s done..
|  | Reviewed on 2008-02-25
Nearly $300 for THIS!? Shame on Adobe!
This program is definitely NOT worth the nearly $300 price tag! It is full of bugs, and lacks functionality and flexibility. I'm really shocked that Adobe priced it this high. Because, the bottom line is that it does very little that any free or low cost photo organizer can't do, and it does nothing well, with the possible exception of providing the ability to save different revisions of a photo, without having to make a copy. (Is that function, alone, worth $300? -- It isn't, to me.
Besides the basic lack of usefullness, the program has some major flaws. For example:
There is no "undo" button. There is an Undo function in the Edit Menu, but the undo history is global, instead of having a separate undo history for each individual photo.
There are only two ways to save a slideshow: You can export to PDF; or you can have the program ftp it to your web site. There is no option to save it to your local drive, as html, so you can rename files and tweak it with your own html editor before sending it to your website. Also, even if you do send it to your web server, the software does not provide a blog capable option that is easy to implement.
Also, I went to a lot of trouble to create a preset in Develop mode, and applied it to a lot of photos in a collection. After I had all the photos the way I wanted them, I decided to try out the slide show creation tool, which, by the way, was not particularly impressive, with its very small number of templates, none of which was appealing to my eye. (There are plenty of "FREE" programs and online applications that will do a much better job at slideshow creation.
Anyway, after trying the 4 or 5 slide show types, I went back to Develop mode, and the preset I had created in Develop mode earlier was GONE! It simply disappeared! Then, to make matters worse, as soon as I returned to the collection where I had applied that preset earlier, it reverted all of the photos to a previous preset, right before my eyes! -- An obvious bug had wiped out 3 hours of work in 2 seconds! With no ability to "undo", since I didn't do it!
There was another bug, where the scrolling photo strip at the bottom would start scrolling really fast when you drap the slider with your mouse, but as soon as you let go of the mouse, it would jump back to where you started, kind of like a rubber band was attached. So, you ended up having to move the filmstrip to the left, one photo at a time, until the scroll bar worked again.
I wish I had listened to the previous reviewer who said this software was not worth the money. They were SOOO right! This software is not in the same class with other programs in this price range, and you do expect a LOT more out of software, when you pay this much for it!
If this software had been $40 or $50, I'd have said it was 'maybe' worth it. Don't these software companies realize that to most people $300 is a LOT of money!? I swear Adobe has got dollar signs tattoo'ed to the insides of their eyelids! Don't they realize that they've priced their software so high that the average consumer can't afford it? You'd think those geniouses would be better at math. They would make a much bigger profit, by pricing their software afordably, because they'd sell a lot more of it. I wish they would quit taking advantage of people the way Microsoft does! I mean, you gotta have an Operating System, so Microsoft kind of has the average consumer bent over a barrel, and they can and do charge exorbatent prices and get away with it, (I guess Gates can never have enough money!)
Well, take my word for it! You can definitely do without this over priced, buggy, not-ready-for-Prime-Time piece of software! Shame on Adobe for pricing it so high!
I wish I could return the product and get my money back! I feel like I was conned, because I expected more from the Adobe name, especially at this price!
If you need a reasonably priced photo editor, for Windows, check out Xara! | | Reviewed on 2008-02-24
Fantastic for prolific amateur photographers
The several-day learning curve is worth it, even if you aren't a professional. Lightroom cut the time I spend sorting photos in a third.
It's well worth spending some time learning the keyboard shortcuts - check out the video tutorials on Adobe's site (even before you buy). They'll give you a sense of how you can speed up your workflow, and spend your time actually *taking* pictures, rather than fiddling with them after the fact. | | Reviewed on 2008-01-14
Almost Pointless
If you're a professional photographer who needs to adjust multiple, similar photographs in terms of brightness, contrast, and hue- then this software is a gift from the gods.
For anyone else- people who want to edit one-off photos you took of your family during the last holiday, this software is pretty much pointless and FAR over-priced.
Thankfully we were smart enough to download the latest trial version from adobe before dropping hundreds of dollars on this dud. We stared at it for a while trying to figure out how to do a very simple edit and then gave up (BTW: I have 25 years in the IT industry and am pretty proficient with Photoshop).
Instead, I found a demo of a Photoshop-like program pre-installed on our computer (which costs only $60 to register) and tried to perform the same operation on the same photo. It took about 90 seconds.
Guess which one we'll be buying?
Just before trying both demo programs, I had a chat with a pro photographer (whose name I'll withhold because any decent pro photographer would know who he is, immediately), and he did not have anything positive to say about lightroom, suggesting Photoshop instead. | | Reviewed on 2007-12-26
Its quite nice but....
I am sorry to rain on the parade of adulations for lightroom but..
I have been trialing this software for 26days to date and i simply cannot (and yet also can) understand the hype and adulations this s/w has received to date..
On the plus side..
1. Its a gorgeous user interface
2. It is a great library & catalog program
3. Sorry, there isnt a 3..thats it.
On the negative side..
1. At best it is a so-so image EDITOR.. it recommends you go pay $600 for CS3 to do image editing?.. Luckily you can get Corel Paint shop Pro for $79 and launch it from Lightroom.
2. Its claim to be "all you need" is as false as you get.. unless sending unedited images to the web is all you plan to do.
I have canon equipment and so can use DPP for RAW conversion (free), zoombrowser (free) or Corel photo album @ $39 for organising then honestly is an extra $260 worth it?
In summary,
Look, i am sorry, but for $300 i would expect something more than Elements on steroids, and when you still need an external editor and an external print manager such as Qimage this fails way way short on value for money except for professionals with huge volumes of images.
I am disappointed. I had hoped for a single solution (as claimed) to my workflow...yet i have gone back to using DPP for RAW light management, and i still have to use Paint shop pro for those 5-10% of images that need editing, so in essence lightroom has substituted a prettier interface than corel photo album for image management. For the hobbyist and serious amateur i feel this $299 is more of an ego trip rather than a necessary product.
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