Photoshop Lightroom – Ars Technica Review
Adobe has clearly benefited from the public beta feedback and put it to good use. They might not get geek points for using Core Image, but Lightroom innovates in its own way by providing a mother lode of intuitive adjustments, many ways to navigate and tag a huge library of images and it does it with speed to spare. The crazy wealth of toggles, presets, snapshots, metadata filtering techniques, history states, etc. ensures that you’re not going to be looking for a workaround while trying to work quickly and these things don’t overlap to the point of taking up space needlessly. It would be really easy to mess up an interface like this and thankfully Adobe has done a really good job at throwing a ton at us while not making it look like it.
The prospect of having third-party filters in a RAW setting is also great. The only real drawbacks in Lightroom 1.0 is the lack of a more sophisticated sharpen tool and lackluster high-ISO RAW conversion quality. These will likely be the first place third-party developers will look to improve on Lightroom with plug-ins but Adobe needs to fill these gaps itself since it also affects Camera RAW.
But all in all, Lightroom is a really great program that is just short of a nine or ten. I don’t doubt that this is going to be a very popular program and for Windows users, it’s a no-brainer for professional photographers. Mac users on older hardware will also appreciate its low system requirements. Lightroom is off to a very promising start and it’s definitely one of the better ways to spend 43 megabytes.
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