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:



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

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!

Starting down the road...

I can't believe it my little baby girl turned 6 years old today, it seem like only 5 minutes since she was hoisted over the blue surgical drape and blinked her eyes in disbelief at the shockingly white world which greeted her.

In the interests of developing a common interest to cultivate in her older years and spend some time together (and honestly not aimed at persuading her to take her hands off my Nikon D300 forever) we bought her her very own digital camera.

To say she seems pretty taken with it would the understatement of the century, she's managed to take over 200 photos with her little fisher price camera in less than 4 hours. Not sure even my D300 would beat her on continuous, hmm maybe we'll have to try one day, a shoot out of the photography variety. Of course most of them were very 'bad', she likes self portraits, but often focuses on just her mouth of ear, I fear she would hit explore if we were to post her greatest hit from today on flickr, who knows what drives the magic donkey?


Anyway, my position as house photographer is safe, so long as I have photoshop on my side...