Ken McMahon, Personal Computer World, Tuesday 30 September 2008 at 15:10:00
Better integration with Photoshop improves this management and editing software
Following a four-month public beta, Adobe has released Photoshop Lightroom 2, the second version of its advanced photo-management application.
If you’re a Lightroom 1.4 user, the major benefits an upgrade will confer include local adjustment brushes allowing exposure and other adjustments to be applied to parts of the image, improved volume management which simplifies and enhances handling of offline image files, more flexible output options and tighter Photoshop integration.
Until now there has been a line in the sand defining the respective functions of management applications such as Lightroom and editing applications such as Photoshop, restricting the former’s editing tools to global adjustments such as exposure, colour control and sharpening. Lightroom’s new Adjustment brush crosses that line and will no doubt be part of a continuing trend.
Eight effects can be applied with the brush, including exposure, saturation, clarity and colour. A ‘soften skin’ preset combines clarity and sharpness adjustments in a custom brush – you can also define and save your own custom brush presets. An ‘auto mask’ option intelligently masks parts of the image as you paint, restricting the adjustment to colours sampled from under the brush, to apply adjustments to individual elements.
Another new tool that is likely to replace more involved Photoshop retouching is the graduated filter, which applies the same adjustments as the brush using a linear gradient mask. In most cases this is going to be used as a digital graduated neutral density filter, darkening and adding saturation to skies without affecting foreground detail in landscape shots.
The Library module has been redesigned with a cleaner workspace that offers more information about your images than the old layout. The folders panel displays online and offline volumes and can be configured to display used/available disk space, number of photos or online status. A new filter bar displayed in the Library grid view allows you to whittle down a folder of images on the basis of a text, attribute or metadata filter. The filter bar is both immensely powerful and easy to use. You can text search any metadata field, or confine it to specific data, keywords, or captions for example.
