Saturday 25 October 2008

Enjoying lightroom 2, and the kids toys...

I was recently persuaded by a review in a photography magazine to download a trial of lightroom 2. Already being an enthusiastic user of lightroom I could not see what additional benefits it would offer over my combination of lightroom and photoshop as my routine for processing is to fix any exposure/white balance problems in lightroom and run and b&w conversions then export to PS for watermarking and any other kind of editing needed. Although this can be a frustrating process when LR's develop module hung and continually exported the wrong image I was happy with that and wondered what improvements could be made for another version.

Well, the main advantage for me in my 5 days of trial use has been ability to apply a vignette to a cropped image and the changes to the crop overlay it's self allow for easier size ration selection etc.

The first image below was edited in lightroom version 1:

massacre in the night garden

The next image was edited with lightroom version 2 using the same action:


in the night garden siege ended

Although it used the same preset the results are quite different because of the ability to apply vignette post-crop.

Not certain yet whether I will spring for the full version once my trial has ended, it depends on whether it become indispensable between now + then. The only teething difficultly is that as I do not have the option financially to also spring for PS CS4 lightroom 2 will not open and export images to CS3 for editing. However, version 1 so frequently exported the wrong image and hung that it may be quicker to export a file and open it myself anyway.

And go on admit it any mother of pre-school children, you have been desperate to take revenge on the characters of 'In the night garden' for years and are very jealous that I have had a therapeutic morning of character squishing in the name of testing a new version of lightroom out!

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