LightRoom 2

To go with my new camera, I now have a new piece of software that I am in love with – LightRoom 2. Big surprise that it’s yet another Adobe product.

When I was on a Windows machine (been Mac only for two years as of this month), I was first really into Picassa, and then discovered Photoshop Elements. I really loved the photo management and categorizing aspects of Elements on Windows, but when I switched over to the Mac I found that the Mac version of Elements really only did the image processing stuff. All the catalogue stuff was in the Windows version only. I looked aorund at a bunch of other photo management / editing packages but didn’t really find anything I liked. Finally settled on iPhoto as the default solution.

But honestly, iPhoto sucks. The management features are OK, but seriously, what’s up with locking all your photos away in that library bundle. And within that you have your originals in one folder and edited copies in another. All that’s fine if you only ever use iPhoto, but the minute you want to move to something else, you are screwed. It’s photo management for your grandma. Hide all those scary JPGs away. Don’t want to see them messing up your file system. And the editing features in there are pretty minimal too.

Then a month or so ago, Picassa finally made it over to the Mac. I installed it and started using it. It’s definitely a step up from iPhoto. A big step.It’s actually really great software, and hell, it’s free. Keeps all your photos wherever you want them, untouched. Applies edits via metadata that only become permanent if you save or export the photo. Really nice. I highly recommend it, especially if you are on a budget.

But I guess I got greedy. I recalled that I had a copy of LightRoom 1 down in the basement somewhere. I’d gotten it free a year or so before for participating in something at Adobe. But by then I was already in iPhoto apathy and never even took it out of the shrinkwrap. I dug through the boxes that were still unpacked from our move into the house, and found it, unshrunkwrapped it and installed it.

Wow! What awesome softwared. What I didn’t realize is that LightRoom is a direct descendant of PhotoShop Elements, along with all the management stuff that I had loved on the Windows version, only even more grown up. And some really rockin’ editing features too. After 5 or 10 minutes of playing around with LightRoom 1, I knew that was the software I had been looking for, in a box in the basement all this time. Seconds later, I was on the Adobe site shelling out the $99 for the version 2 upgrade.

I guess it’s $299 for the full version, but if you’re serious about keeping track of your photos and making them look good, I still think it’s worth it. It’s simple on the surface but has some serious depth. Like Picassa, your photos are saved wherever you put them, and edits are applied as metadata. Meaning your original images are never touched unless you save the edited version over the original.

Anyway, I recommend Picassa if you want to save money, and LightRoom 2 if you are ready to go all out. I’ll probably talk more about specific features as I discover them or get excited about them.