Friday, March 20, 2009
Adobe Lightroom 2 Delivers A Great Raw Photo Workflow
Posted by Jason Dunn in "Digital Home Software" @ 07:00 AM
Product Category: Photo editing software
Manufacturer: Adobe
Where to Buy: Amazon.com [Affiliate]
Price: $265.99 USD ($99 upgrade from Lightroom 1.0 direct from Adobe)
System Requirements: Windows XP SP2, Windows Vista (32-bit or 64-bit) or OS X 10.4/10.5. 1 GB RAM, 1 GB hard drive space...but if you have a computer with those specs, you probably shouldn't be shooting in raw. Figure on 2+ GB of RAM and a 2+ Ghz dual-core CPU for decent performance.
Pros:
- Great quality raw photo conversions using Adobe Camera Raw;
- Fast software that scales to multi-core systems beautifully;
- Clearly designed for photography professionals in a hurry;
- Impressive depth of tools for correction, adjusting, printing, and sharing online.
Cons:
- Lack of HDR functionality; no duplicate filtering
- Needs a fast CPU and plenty of RAM to really sing;
- No automatic lens barrel distortion correction like DxO Optics Pro offers.
Summary: Lightroom is a photo processing software package aimed at professional and prosumer users. More specifically, it's raw photo processing software. If you don't have a camera that can shoot in raw format, or you're only shooting in JPEG, this isn't the software for you. If you're a photographer who shoots in raw format and are looking for software that will help you develop, edit, process, sort, rank, and export your images, this is among the best software on the market for those tasks and well-worth the asking price. Read more...
