Appletell reviews Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 for Mac OS X

Provides: Photo editing, manipulation and management
Format: Retail
Developer: Adobe
Minimum System Requirements: Intel processor, Mac OS X v.10.5 or v10.6, 2GB RAM, 1GB of available HDD, 1024×768 display (or better), CD-ROM
Price: $299 ($99 for upgrade)
Availability: Now

Lightroom 3 is Adobe’s newest update to their amazing photo-developing application. Its tools and features can help you ensure your photos are at their best, whether you start with great pictures or even ones with numerous problems.

I want to preface this review by saying that I have not reviewed any previous versions of Lightroom, nor Apple’s competing product: Aperture. I’ll be looking at Lightroom 3 as a first time user, not necessarily a user looking to upgrade from a previous version. That said, you may find my comments to be sufficient in this regard as well. Also, Lightroom 3 is packed with features; I simply cannot cover them all. I’ve chosen to highlight the most useful and notable features, in my opinion. Alright, let’s get to it.

While Adobe makes both Lightroom 3 and Photoshop, they are very different applications for different purposes. Photoshop is a tool for doing work on images individually. It’s also great for creating images from scratch. Lightroom 3 is not. Lightroom is the perfect tool for a photographer who wants to take images (of varying levels of quality) and make them great. That’s not to say that they can’t work together, because they’re made to. You just have to take photography a little more seriously to see the value in Lightroom. Adobe markets it towards the “advanced amateur or professional photographer.” So if you aren’t concerned with White Balance, ISO, DOF, Aperture etc, you might as well move along.

The first thing you’ll notice when working with Lightroom 3 is that its interface is top notch. I simply love the dark theme that makes your images the center of attention, rather than the tools. Tools reside in drawers that can be pulled out or tucked away. This is a fantastic feature that anyone who’s used to iPhoto will fall in love with; tools, here, never cover up your image, unlike in iPhoto. After all, the whole app is a tool to transform your images to greatness, not clutter up your view or detract from the images in the first place.

To get started, you’ll need photos. Importing those photos is simple. If the import window doesn’t automatically pop up when you plug in your camera or memory card, you can start importing by selecting Import from the File menu. You can import from any directory on your computer (including directly from cameras or memory cards), but importing from iPhoto will be a pain as you’ll have to export your images first. Unfortunately, you can’t use iPhoto to import, sort and store your photos, which is a pretty big bummer to me.

To import your photos, select the source and destination locations. If any of your images are RAW, then you’ll also have the option of importing them as DNG. DNG is Adobe’s standardized RAW format. Honestly, I’m not sure that it matters, but converting to this format may make your images easier for others to view and edit. That’s likely not something that you care about anyway, because you’ll be exporting these photos in a different format before printing or sending them along, anyway.

There are other tools, as, well inside of the import dialog that can help streamline the process of developing your images. Things like auto-renaming, avoiding of duplicates, applying preset effects and editing metadata. I prefer to skip most of these because I think most images need to be handled individually, and I don’t like to apply effects in batch. Your specific image set may be different though, so it’s nice to have the option.

Now, after you import all of your photos, you’ll want to actually start editing, or developing them. This is where Lightroom 3 really shines. Obviously, the better your original content is, the better your end product will be. But you might be surprised just how much Lightroom 3 can fix.

There are two ways to go about developing your images, and it depends on a few things. If your images don’t need a lot of help, then you can just use Quick Develop. This gives you access to the most commonly used tools, including white balance, tone control, exposure, clarity and vibrance. You can also add keywords, comments or edit metadata. Quick Develop isn’t really my style, because I really like to edit each image that I think is worth pursuing in great detail. That said, this is a great tool for quickly modifying images, and many times you don’t need the full set of tools. You can also use this to touch up an image that has already been developed, in case you see something that needs to quickly be adjusted.

If you’re anything like me, and I’ll assume you are, Develop is where the real fun is. Nearly everything you could possibly want to do to your images is available here. You can crop, remove red eye, adjust levels, apply saturation and vibrance, sharpen, reduce noise, apply lens correction and perspective correction, apply a curve, brighten, adjust contrast and black levels, change exposure…you get the “picture.” Some of these features are brand new, and some just need more detailed descriptions, so let me cover them in more detail.

• Noise Reduction – Noise is generally much more of a problem with lower quality cameras (point and shoot). But if you’re taking photos at high ISOs, you just can’t avoid it. The noise reduction built into this application is superb. You can really smooth out noise in a natural looking way with this app, sometimes to the point of rescuing an unusable photo. That’s a real godsend for images of scenes that will never take place again. Neither Adobe, nor I, promise that it will fix everything, but it’s certainly not an off-limits slider anymore. You might even be comfortable enough to use it much more often to improve the quality of your images, which is something I wasn’t comfortable doing before Lightroom 3. Hopefully, you won’t need this tool, but it’s there if/when you need it.

• Color – Why stop at White Balance and Saturation? Well, you don’t have to. Lightroom gives you much more control than something like iPhoto. It actually makes iPhoto look broken in comparison. You can individually edit color channels (there are for hue, luminance and saturation. This kind of fine grain control really allows you to do some amazing things. If certain colors in your image are too bright, or their color seems to detract from the overall theme or focus of the image, adjust them.

• Lens Correction – Most lenses produce some sort of distortion. You can fix things like geometric distortion, chromatic aberration, and vignetting. This happens based on a profile that you can either create or download for your specific lens. Correcting for these common distortions is now as simple as a few clicks, which will either save you some time or make you realize that your images have been distorted without you even realizing it. In the example image, you can see just how much this correction can do. The “after” image is much more lifelike.

• Perspective Correction – This feature is crazy. Now you don’t even have to take your image at the correct angle. Okay, that’s a bit of an overstatement. But you can change the perspective of your images to a certain extent. Generally, this will be useful when you want a straight on representation of something of which you’ve take a picture from a slight angle, such as a whiteboard, sign etc. Not as useful as Lens Correction, but you’ll be glad you have it when you need it.
• Multiple monitor support – Lightroom can really take advantage of extra monitors. There are a ton of options and configurations available. You can do things like edit in one monitor and view the image full screen on another, or display a slideshow on another monitor. I really like that there are options specifically built to take advantave of extra monitors because many of us are working with this kind of setup already, and native support is best.
• Nondestructive editing – This means you can reset any or all of your changes at any point in time. If you’ve been editing for a few minutes and decide that you liked the image better five minutes ago, scroll down the history toolbar and click on previous edit save points. That’s one of my favorite features since it gets used so often. There’s also a before and after view mode that makes it dead simple to see just how much Lightroom has changed your image from beginning to end.
• Curves – I’m actually a little surprised to find out that Lightroom 2 didn’t have curves. In any event, they are here, alongside their older equivalent, sliders.
• Tethered shooting – If you have a supported camera, you can actually take images directly from inside Lightroom 3. This is useful in very specific scenarios, but definitely a cool feature if your camera supports it. Mine does not. If you have a recent Canon or Nikon, you’re probably ready to go with this one.
• Photoshop integration – Sometimes you just need Photoshop. That’s fine. Now you can open an image in Photoshop from Lightroom, do your edits, save, and see the output right away in Lightroom.
• Watermarking – While exporting, you now have the option to apply a watermark to your images. Quite a handy feature.
• Flickr – Just like iPhoto and Aperture, you can now upload your finished images straight to Flickr. Still no official Facebook uploader, but you can add one through a plug-in.
• Plug-ins – You can actually download tons of plug-ins for Lightroom 3. Most commonly, plug-ins are packs of effects that you can apply to photos, but they can be more sophisticated, as with the Facebook uploader, for example.
• Slideshow – Automatically output a slideshow complete with music.

So what kind of results can you really expect? That’s a pretty tough question to answer, really. Here’s one of the images I recently took and developed with Lightroom 3.

Each image is different, so your results for each will be different. Also, the longer you use this application, the better your images will turn out because you’ll get a better feel for all of the tools and what works the best. Lightroom 3 will astound anyone who’s used to using iPhoto. The tools that are available are just so much better and more refined than those available in iPhoto or other lesser image editors.

The only real downside that I’ve found in this app relates to features that really shine in Apple’s iPhoto. iPhoto does a really great job of making it easy to publish your photos to Flickr and Facebook. It also makes it easy to organize your photos based on location, events and even faces. Plus, syncing images between iPhone and your iDevices is dead simple. The same can’t be said for Lightroom 3. I don’t know that these features are necessary inside of Lightroom, and honestly, you don’t have to use Lightroom for all of your photos. I just wish there was a good way for them to coexist. The best solution is to export your finished images and import them into iPhoto.

Overall, Lightroom 3 is a seriously powerful tool for photographers. The amount and effectiveness of the tools available truly make it possible for you to transform images that may have previously been labeled as garbage into very usable—if not amazing—images. But you have to start with great composition and source material. While Lightroom can fix things like noise, brightness and other things, it can’t fix what you took a picture of, from what general viewpoint it was taken, or any number of other factors that simply aren’t fixable.

But you’re a great photographer, right? Then Lightroom 3 is the tool you need to touch up your photos into greatness. Sadly, though, if you use this application correctly, anyone who sees your end results should never know you did a thing in the first place.

Appletell Rating:

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