Adobe Lightroom 2 Released

After my post yesterday regarding the "new" promotional site for Lightroom I decided to try it out. I took a few images from my flickr photostream that could do with some touching up.

Minor Installer Issue

As I expected the installer asked me which language I would like to use. It had defaulted to German because thats my computers regional setting, but I chose English. After the install, though, the language was still German. I had to go into the options again, select English, close Lightroom and reopen it in order for my language choice to take.

Strangely enough I downloaded the English Windows version to begin with and I still had to chose my language twice.

Features

There are a host of new or improved features in Lightroom 2, and entirely too many to go through each. There are a couple features that I just discovered that are bound to become favorites, such as the ability to correct vignettes, which seem to be typical for digital cameras when shot at wide angle. Another cool feature is the before/after split, which allows you to see the original and re-touched image using a splitter bar.

Intelligent Tool-tips

I am sure most professional photographers that use Photoshop or other photo editing tools know exactly how the different areas on a Tone Curve affect the image, but Adobe has added feedback for the amateurs (like myself). The feed back shows that at the bottom of the curve you affect the shadows and as you move up the curve you go through darks, lights, highlights.

Price

So is it worth it? I guess that really depends, if you want to touch up photos for print or the web but not create anything new with them then Lightroom at $299 is a heck of a lot less than the $650 for Photoshop CS3.

I own Photoshop 7 and I know I only use about 1/50th of what it's capable of doing, with Lightroom I may actually end up using 1/3 or more of it's features. I'm not a graphic artist I am an avid amateur photographer, so using a tool geared more toward a photographers needs makes more sense.