We continue our look at favorite products of the year, today with photo software. Tomorrow we'll look at video programs.
No software made a bigger impact on my daily life than Adobe's update of Lightroom, the program for managing workflow and making quick edits on the fly.
The difference between Lightroom 2 and Lightroom 3, the new version ($99 for upgrades, $299 for new purchasers--but often discounted to around $220) released officially in July, is dramatic. Adobe also came out in the summer with a new version of flagship Photoshop, CS5, which has a few new bells and whistles, but not enough to make you run out to fork over $199 for the upgrade. (New users will pay $699.)
Lightroom 3 is what all upgrades should be--with so much cool new stuff that you can't live with the old version any more.
There are so many must have features, but topping the list is Lightroom 3's noise reduction technology. You can take a photo shot in ultra low light, run it through Lightroom, and much of the noise will go away. (You'll also need to sharpen the photo post noise reduction as well, otherwise it might look a little fuzzy.) This tool eliminates the need for add-on software like Noise Ninja or Nik Multimedia'sDfine.
When importing pictures into Lightroom, the new version offers visual thumbnails, and lets you select which images to bring in--saving room on your hard drive from turkeys that would have been deleted later.
The "Develop" module of Lightroom, where you make your edits, lets you tweak the exposure, white balance, saturation and overall color. I've put a photo shot in front of a green screen into Lightroom, and eliminated the green completely--turning the background into gray. I could have done it in Photoshop, but this saved a step.
Lightroom 3 also added the ability to view video files in the program, which seemed like a big deal at the time, but while welcome, doesn't really add much. Many of us are shooting stills and videos on the same memory card with Digital SLRs and point-and-shoot cameras, but Lightroom is a video viewer, not an editor, so not much help there except for putting the video files in the same folder as your photo shoot. But if they're going to be edited, you'll have to eventually move them into their own folder.
Photoshop guru Scott Kelby this year wrote a long post about features he'd like to see in Lightroom 4 -- software we'll surely see in 2011. Specifically, he asked for better tools for online slideshows, printing and web galleries. I agree that the tools available now are lackluster, but the Lightroom editing and organization tools are so strong, I think Adobe should focus on those, and just forget about the others. Lightroom should focus on what it does best--instead of trying to be all things
