Lightroom 2.0

Adobe announced that Lightroom 2.0 was officially available from its website. The photo management software costs $299 and the upgrade is $99.

The improvements in Lightroom 2.0 over its beta version can be found here

Thomas Hawk lists 10 best things he likes about Lightroom 2.0 (via Imaging Insider)

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Lightroom, MediaStorm and SoundSlides?

Photograph © Tewfic El-Sawy-All Rights Reserved
I'll be blogging from London, England for about two weeks.

Here's a post by travel & outdoor photographer Michael Clark for the O'Reilly Digital Media blog which I can't agree with more.

The gist of the article is that with photojournalism rapidly evolving, and the growing necessity of integrating still photography into multimedia, and since Lightroom is currently the leading tool for photographers to work with their images, Michael's opinion (and Bob Sacha's as well) is that it would be an enormous advantage to have SoundSlides integrated into Lightroom as a plug in or in some other manner.

Yes, and yes.

I've already written on the imperative of photographers and photojournalists being multimedia narrators here, and this article simply reinforces my multimedia evangelism.

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Lightroom: Stunning Black & White

Photograph © Tewfic El-Sawy-All Rights Reserved
Chris Orwig of Layers magazine has written an article on how to create stunning black & white images in Lightroom.

I sometimes test tutorials, whether for Lightroom or Photoshop (the latter less and less frequently), but usually find them too complicated...and frankly, not worth the time to learn them. As I often mention, I'm far from being a pixel pusher, and my fiddling with photographs is kept to an absolute minimum. So I'm not at all keen in learning a superfluous new technique that I sense will keep me chained to my desk for hours.

However this one is well worth the time and effort...it's simple, it's effective and even allowed me to add some tone to the final image. I've used it to create the above photograph taken last week in Coney Island in a matter of minutes.

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POV: Lightroom Or...?

Image © Tewfic El-Sawy-All Rights Reserved
The photographer Georges Mann has written an article tackling the "Can Lightroom 2 replace Photoshop CS3?" question on the O'Reilly Digital Media blog. This of course is a question that triggers endless debates, Byzantine arguments and lots of harumphs from both sides of the aisle..sort of like the Canon vs Nikon debate.

I believe that Lightroom 2 does all I need and more, and I'm glad that I've opted to go for it instead of spending my life's savings on CS3 (or on its endless stream of successors).

In a nutshell, Mann's 6th prediction in the article is precisely my view. I'd be less cautious in my verbiage than he is, but we all have our own writing style.

"6. Photo Journalists & Travel photographers - there are exceptions but most of these photographers deal with reality, so Lightroom should be enough for editing out bad shots, improving bad exposures and generally applying a personal look to their images. Lightroom can also help them present their images to their clients and put galleries on the internet."

Exactly! As a documentary and travel ethnographic photographer, I'm into reality ( I seldom crop, for instance), not fantasy...and I'm not a pixel-pusher, so CS3 is a software program that I don't need.

I occasionally listen to the arcane discussions by CS3 (or its other versions) users, who extol the minutiae of layers, adjustments, and other tools, that just make me roll my eyes to the heavens and yawn!

Via Imaging Insider.

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Lightroom 2.0: Decision Time

Well, time does fly. It's been a month since I signed on to try Lightroom 2.0 which means that the free trial period is over, and I now have to decide whether to buy it for $300.

There are many websites that offer tutorials, and here's one recommended to me by Dave Thompson, a regular reader of this blog and who frequently offers me his insight on photography.

Julieanne Kost's Lightroom Tutorials

I still have some free time on my Aperture trial period, which I'm still fiddling with. Despite Aperture's "fit" with Apple software, I am leaning heavily towards Lightroom.

For a comparison of the two, check Gavin Gough's post on the matter. I won't divulge his preference, but I found his analogy to be interesting:

"If they (Lightroom and Aperture) were people, Lightroom would be a dour, stodgy Yorkshire lass sitting in the corner of a smoke-filled, dingy pub drinking Stout and Babycham whilst fingering her moustache and mumbling at her whippet, whilst Aperture would be a leggy blonde model perched elegantly on a stool in the corner of a Soho wine bar, sexily sipping a cocktail before beckoning you over to her table with a smouldering pout and a suggestively raised eyebrow.

I reckon I'm a Yorkshire lass kind of guy.

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