The 10 best things about Adobe Lightroom 2 - A review...

An early post release review of Adobes Photoshop Lightroom 2 by Thomas Hawk

::  Click the image or here to launch the review on his website  ::

Thomas Hawk has undertaken what looks like a pretty in depth review of Adobe's Photoshop Lightroom 2. Especially given that it hasn't long been launched.

As we are generally Aperture users here at Ginkgo, we thought that we'd simply link directly to Thomas' work, as from what I can see, this soon after the release of Lightroom 2, it's covering most of the bases that you'd be interested in if you were considering an upgrade or a fresh purchase.

There also seems to be a good array of comments and discussion going on, which can be useful, or just plain cause confusion - You can decide for yourself.

Comments

[John Esberg]

So, why do you use apeture vs. Adobe Lightroom 2.0? I'd like to hear your reasoning and logic on the subject.

[Stewart]

One of the primary reasons we use Aperture is, because we can, as we are Apple based and it is a piece of software not available to PC users.

But the most important reasons are much more fundamental from a professional workflow point of view. As I am still to have a good play with Lightroom 2, the key decision makers were based on the previous version vs Aperture 2.

One key issue we had with Lightroom was its preview renditions of much of our studio based work when wirelessly tethered - To be blunt, it was utterly awful and with art directors in the room with us it was almost embarrassing at how bad it was (the specific decider shoot was a black set with a great deal of tonality in the dark areas going on - All we got was some pixelated mush), whereas Aperture rendered the previews perfectly, so we could see exactly what we were getting and could therefore adjust lighting shot by shot knowing that what we were seeing on screen was what we were going to get. So in essence, reliability of image representation.

We also find the workflow much better with our setups, both in the studio and on location and the ability to manage projects as single entities into a central repository and also to deligate projects from that repository totally invaluable.

Also the image tuning abilities of Aperture 2, for us, are a league above Lightroom 1 and the more we use it, the more it simply astounds us at what it can do and how well it can do it. Plus the way it works with the operating system and Automator actions in OS X suits the way we work with multiple camera systems. Particularly its support for Hasselblad RAW files.

Now, when I started using Aperture 1, I have to be honest, I didn’t like it at all over Lightroom, It was slower, the golden ratio guides were not in it and at first it looked overly complicated and that it was going to be a real pain to use - so we didn’t use it and did use Lightroom.

Then Aperture 2 came along with its new API architecture and workflows which had actually been created after talking to lots of photographers - and it showed. Within a few days of playing with it we were hooked and now use it as our primary environment.

Having said all of that - I’ll let you in to a little secret - We use both...

Lightroom is great for the output of multiple style proofs really quickly, especially for social portrait sessions and the ease of applying pre-created styles instantly for their input and review is great.

So what we generally do, is use Aperture 2 for our commercial work and Lightroom 1 for our social photographic work.

If I were asked by a non-professional which package they should probably choose, even without having had a real good play with Lightroom 2, I’d still recommend it over Aperture 2 and the reason is simple. It’s a much simpler package to learn and use. The presets are great and the issues we faced are unlikely to be encountered by the vast majority of non-professionals.

My finishing analogy (which I’ll probably get slated for) would be if Photoshop Elements were Lightroom, then Photoshop CS3 Extended would be Aperture 2. So only get it if you’re really going to use what it can do for you.

[JENNABooth]

Do you know that it's high time to receive the loan, which will make your dreams come true.