Gadgetell Quick Review: Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2

What is it?

Lightroom 2 is a program for Windows and Mac OS X designed to help organize, streamline, and develop your photos. It costs $99 for the upgrade from Lightroom 1 or $299 for first time buyers.

Pros:

Easy to use thanks to clean and organized interface.Imports all of your files using your preexisting directory structure.Works with a wide variety of file formats.

Cons:

Does not allow pixel editing. Requires another program for that task.Initial use can be frustrating and can cause loss of work.

Does it hit the mark?

Yes. Lightroom 2 definitely lived up to all of my expectations. It’s easy to see that this program would be extremely popular with anyone working in the art or ad industry, or someone who does batch work with photos. The program allows for very controlled editing and is remarkably easy to use.

For the full review, click “More.”

Often us photographers think we did a pretty good job with optimizing our different picture files, but then when a text editor is used we are able to see that they still contain a ton of data that can actually be removed. Yep, there are different programs out there that can be used to extract this information from the different GIFs, PNGs, or JPEGs, and still allow the photo look great, but many of these programs require a pretty specific knowledge to use them. Unless the user knows what they are doing when it comes to command-line tools, they are pretty much out of luck. Until now.

Two members from the Yahoo exceptional performance team, Stoyan Stefanov and Nicole Sullivan, took what they knew of these tools and built a single application called Smush.it that does all the optimizations for you in just one place. Completely cloud-based, it allows you to upload images, give the image a URL, or use it as a Firefox extension. The program shows you how many bytes you’ll save, and then gives you the images as .zip file for you to replace them on your site.