Adobe Lightroom is amazing. I have been using it since the first beta, it just wasn't something I could switch to. At a studio I work at they have Capture One, which is an amazing piece of software, but I found it lacking when it comes to organizing "my" photos. I bought Apples Aperture when it came out, and it blew me away. Aperture has the loupe, (now found in bridge cs3), light table (Lightrooms new compare feature), which is amazing for setting up comps, if you like to do story work on your photos. Aperture has a rejection tag that you can use to reject photos to delete later (bad blur, or too many like shots), Lightroom now has this feature as well--you just press X, then when you are ready to rid yourself of those click the delete rejected photos button, if you rejected it accidentally press U, if you have a favorite pic just press P to "pick" it. Aperture has stacks, which if you shoot multiple exposures (hdr, pano, etc) they can be stacked up and you can choose a pick, Lightroom in version 1 now has this as well. The other big feature any other raw program needs to compete with Aperture for me is their collections. Its similar to a smart playlist in iTunes, you can sort by rating, keyword, what have you. Lightroom now has this as well, meaning you can pick your favorite waterfall photos from several years of shooting and put them in a logical folder, meaning no extra space to store your favorites. This feature, and rejection caused me to loose over 40gb by switching to Lightroom!
While my review may seem as though Lightroom copied the best features from Aperture and improved upon them, for the most part that's true. The best part is they improved soo many other features. If you have used Aperture, or iPhoto, you know how big a joke their clone stamp tool is. Lightroom? Just as good as Photoshop! I'm constantly changing lens when I'm out in the field shooting. It is such a pain to have to go to Photoshop and save psds of all my work just to get rid of the dust. Now I don't have too. Lightrooms clone stamp feature is worth the price alone.
Lightroom also has snapshots. You can make a sweet black and white, a fancy stylistic design, or whatever, and save these as snapshots, which are basically separate images, that only take up 24k and is store in that one raw file, opposed to 8-22mb depending on your camera. If snapshots are too complicated to mess with you can use "Virtual Copies" (my personal favorite), where you make a virtual copy of the photo, it stacks it behind the other photo. The big deal is this file is fake, it only takes up the 24k that any raw adjustment takes up inside of Lightroom. You can make multiple copies of the same photo, try different effects, and combine these. I cant tell you how many duplicate files I have on my machine, from multiple PSD's of the same image, to copied over raw files being afraid of messing something up.
Another thing Lightroom excels at is speed. The interface is blazing, I can't believe how fast I can view my raw files. The shortcuts just make since, and everything works like a charm. I am truly in love with this program. Another "speed" aspect of Lightroom is when the canon 400d came out, I wanted to buy it as a backup, I did, and Lightroom was the first, and only raw program to support it for sometime. Aperture didn't support the camera until a couple months ago. I plan on buying the new canon Mark 3 for weddings, and this fact alone makes me want to have Lightroom.
If all this isn't enough, you can create your favorite keywords and apply them as keyboard shortcuts, so if you have something you want to send to a stock photo agency, set a keyword up for that and press cmd+1 or whatever you setup your keywords as. Also I enjoy using bridges way of pressing 1-5 for ratings and 6-9 for colors. Aperture makes you press the + key to rate up however many times. It's not well thought out.
For me Lightroom is a killer app. At 200 it is a steal. My nature photos usually require Photoshop to get rid of dust on my images. I then use Photoshop to do some color correction and sharpening. Now with Lightroom if I need Photoshop at all, it is for comp work, selective sharpening, and special effect work (lighting, vignettes, filters, adjustment layers, etc). I know a lot of people who shoot that never get dust on their lens at all, and this clone stamp might not seem like a big deal, but it is, you can clone plants to fill in gaps, get rid of blemishes, etc. Lightroom is a one stop shop. You can import your photos as DNG's, apply keywords and metadata, while you import. Then you can choose your favorites, go to the develop module, finish up your images, then print, or put it on the web. You can even customize the Lightroom logo on the top now to say "Your Studio" or whatever; it's really a fun app, I hope Lightroom sees some plugins soon to add even more functionality, but right now I am very satisfied, and I am very picky.
5 Stars. Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 1.0 (Win/Mac) [OLD VERSION] - Lightroom - Photography - Adobe Lightroom - Photo Management'
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