You can create multiple libraries. For example as a photographer, you may do some portraits and some events. You could have a library for each and in addition one for your own family photography. The library module has controls that allow you to search for specific types of photos; say you are a nature photographer and you want to find all of your shots of North American water fowl. Again, there is so much more to Adobe Lightroom than I could present in an overview.
In Develop mode, Adobe Lightroom has controls for adjusting the color and tonal scale of your photos. What is nice about this is the fact that all changes are recorded in the database and do not change your photo. Your instructions are stored and applied to your photo in memory, so you can experiment without affecting your actual images.
There is also a histogram panel that allows you to measure the color tones and make adjustments to the tones of your photo. You can fine-tune your colors with the Tone Curve. You can do split toning for coloring of monochrome images as well as doing special effects. You can adjust the sharpness and reduce noise with the detail panel and correct chromatic aberrations with Lens Corrections.
The Slideshow module is a method to present your photos with music and translations. You can create a template to customize how you want your slideshows to look. They can contain your identity plate on each slide. One thing that I don't like is that to distribute a slide show you have to export it to a PDF file, but then you loose the music. It would be nice if you could create a presentation and distribute it.
The Printing Photos module allows you to print photos and contact sheets. There are also settings that allow you to overlay images with text, photo information, and other options. There are pre-made templates that contain different layouts for diverse output. You can modify their settings to create customized templates. Overall, I like the print module, but it's slightly lacking: when I print a contact sheet, I like to put information on each header of the sheet so that I can quickly identify the information of the shoot. I would also like footer information such as page x of y, the date of the shoot as well as copyright information. And the ability to directly generate a PDF would also be nice; this is an Adobe product after all. I generate all of my contact sheets as PDF along with a color print, and right now it is still a manual process.
Article comments
1 - Howard Dratch
Total agreement. It works well even though I am still using all my film-based Nikons and import digital files from flat-bed and film scanners or have the local (non-professional) lab make a CD.
The web galleries are slick and easy to create. Now I just have to finish making my own web page(s) and pay for a host -- partly because Blogger does a lot of things really well but showing pictures is not one of them.
It is good to have more well-written photography-related articles here on Blogcritics. Thanks.
2 - T. Michael Testi
Thanks Howard for the kind words. When I first heard about it, it sparked my interest but I really did not think that I needed it. Once I started working with it, I was amazed that made my life so much easier.
It is good to have more well-written photography-related articles here on Blogcritics.
That is my hope to generate more articles with a photography slant within "The Enlightened Image"
T.
3 - Jay
I've been playing with Lightroom for a few days now and I watched Chris Orwig's Lynda tutorials and liked them a lot for a quick startup with Lightroom. I understand that the exported pdf does not save the music you've selected when you create a slideshow but can anyone tell me if you can save to the Web with music? Can't find an easy way to do it.
Lightroom itself doesn't seem to allow this, just wondering if that's correct and if anyone knows an easy way to make a music file play when my slideshow starts on the Web.
Thanks,
Jay Levan
4 - Mahesh Shantaram
All those who claim that Adobe created a superior product forget to mention a little-known fact that they actually bought Raw Shooter Premium and only built the bells and whistles around it. Seriously, RSP was so much slicker, but hey, now Lightroom lets me create web albums to share pics with family and friends :-|
5 - clvrmnky
Lightroom was a complete design-and-build from the ground up. Stealing good ideas from RSP was probably a good idea, but Lightroom is a completely different code-base and shares no code with RSP.