Sunday, August 3, 2008

Lightroom 2: Hmm.

For starters, I still don't think most people should upgrade to Lightroom 2. Just too many bugs popping up and/or waiting to be discovered. Give 'em another month or two to go to a .1 version, or at least to fix that GODAWFUL keyword bug. But if you're technically minded (I can tell you how to fix the keyword bug if you are technical) and adventurous, it does have some mindblowingly nifty new features...

For starters, there's the Graduated Filter tool, which is very awesome for landscape shots with hot skies - it's just like applying a gradient-masked adjustment in Photoshop, only WAY easier and faster. And the new camera-specific color profiles are a treat. Several tests have shown that the camera-specific profile for my camera starts out WAY closer to my preferred colors than the old ACR color profiles. You still will often have to do some twiddling - Nature, after all, often doesn't properly saturate the blues or whatever - but as far as getting good color balance, it's a huge improvement. I like the new catalog organization (everything's sorted by volume by default.) And it does seem to handle my very large image catalog (68K images) quite a bit more smoothly. I think it's going to be a great program.

M

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The keyword problem may be an issue to many, but luckily that has nothing to do with my work with scientific based photographs. Material defects get a whole new angle with this software.