Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2: First Look

Get even more control with local adjustments, gradient masks and a healing brush in Adobe’s RAW workflow solution.

$299, street www.adobe.com

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 1.0 freed photographers to work in RAW without laboring in Photoshop, but its major drawback was that it limited you to global fixes. Not anymore. The biggest improvement in Lightroom 2 ($199 as an upgrade from 1) is the local adjustment brush for working on one area of your photo at a time. This time, keywording and collecting are easier, a new gradient tool mimics a graduated filter, and sharpening is more useful—now you can sharpen on export, not just when you print. As with Camera RAW, Adobe will no longer be adding new cameras to Lightroom 1, so if you get a new camera, you’ll have to buy this upgrade right away.

After the Jump, some screen shots of the cool new features.

The Crop tool works like it did in Lightroom’s first version, but now it’s positioned on the top-right side of the Develop pane.
[photo by Shannon Fitzgerald]

Finally, Lightroom lets you make local adjustments. You can cover an area by painting it with the Brush tool, then adjust some sliders to tweak just that area. Here, I lowered the exposure and added some saturation to the sky.

One of the best parts of Lightroom is the ease by which you can export JPEGs and other kinds of files from your RAWs. Finally, you can add sharpening when you do so – a boon for folks who commonly shrink their RAWs down to much smaller files to email.

Here’s the Gradient tool in action, darkening the sky like a grad filter.

Now you can choose from cloning or healing when you want to get rid of your bad spots.

This version of Lightroom is set up for multiple displays, so you can see the photo you’re working on and keep your thumbnails on the side.

—Debbie Grossman
Senior Editor

Tomorrow: My Trip to the Adobe Factory

Comments

[tengis]

I love Lightroom,
but there's still big lack of some very important things such as photo frame something like canvas or ...??
second one is ability to write some text on photo!!! We need some stamp on our creation. To do this we'll always have to use PS, it's not the good way, Please adobe, add some text writing function. ( and ofcoz photo frame pls)