From digital cameras cometh digital photos – lots of them! Adobe’s Lightroom is an attempt to bring some automated control and streamlining to the mundane processes of digital developing and organization. Not intended as a replacement for Photoshop’s layered approach to digital editing, Lightroom is designed, not for the “heavily edited” masterpiece or mulit-image collage, but for the ordinary grind of getting pictures from the camera, organizing, adjusting, and then sharing them.
The program fits into an already crowded range of products from Adobe for digital image manipulation. Already available are consumer products like Elements and heavyweight Photoshop CS3 (in all its forms). Particularly, since some of its features have already been incorporated into Adobe Bridge, is there a space on the shelf for a new program like Lightroom. For me, the answer is a qualified yes: The need is there – but Lightroom doesn’t completely solve the problems it identifies in the Photoshop workflow.
Lightroom shines in making short work of repetitive developing tasks, the kinds of things that Photoshop users handle case-by-case on the “image->adjustment” menu or in image raw: Things like levels, curves, exposure, and saturation. So long as you don’t mind working on the entire image (there are no image masks in Lightroom) it is easy to correct single or multiple images in a flash. Taking a cue from consumer oriented programs (like Elements, for one) a series of sliders make quick work of image correction. You can also work with the histogram, dragging to achieve your desired result. Best of all, these changes are non-destructive; they don’t actually change your original image. You can always roll back to any step along the way! In this respect it is considerably more “intelligent” than Elements, which works its changes on copies of the original. Here the “negative” is never touched at all.
On the other hand, the user interface of Lightroom leaves a lot to be desired. If one of the best things about the new Adobe Creative Suite, CS3, is a unified user interface, then what can we say about Photoshop Lightroom? While it borrows from aspects of Adobe Bridge and Elements, it goes off on its own way – and often for the worse. The designers chose a “grey on grey” interface to highlight the images over the densely packed on-screen control labels. Unfortunately, this same “choice” also makes it hard to read.
One of the most annoying missing features of the interface for Photoshop users is an omnipresent sliding navigator zoom. Your choices, when viewing a single image, are often limited by a series of pre-defined functions or, alternatively, clicking into the image for a 2:1 view. Oddly, when doing a comparison of two pictures there is a zoom bar. On a screen littered with dozens of controls, the lack of a consistent location for something as elemental as a zoom caused me serious misgivings.
Organization of large libraries of photos is one of the areas Adobe focused on in creating Lightroom and there are some notable features including the abilities to compare a group of similar images two at a time, head-to-head, to make easy work of finding the best image. To its credit, Lightroom gives several views of your library: You can search by key word, view the directory structure, and even create virtual “collections” of photos. Each picture can be tagged with user defined keywords, and further categorized by two different built-in rating systems.
All of those features, however, are hobbled by a user interface that often assigns multiple functions to a single control. In programming circles this is called “overloading” a control; an apt term for the confusion it can cause. For instance, clicking from a list of tagged keywords on the left side of the screen displays pictures with the selected tag. Clicking on the keyword and dragging it to an image “tags” the image. However, if you are looking at many photos and don’t click carefully, instead of having the word for “tagging” Lightroom thinks you just want to see pictures already tagged with that keyword. The image you were thinking about tagging “disappears” since it doesn’t yet have the tag. Worse, there is no button to go to the previous selection or to view pictures with no tag. Something as simple as a browser’s “back button” would be a welcome addition to the interface. Matters are further complicated by the user interface by having one portion of the “keyword” controls on the left side of the screen and the other (a palate of 9 key words that can be dragged and dropped) on the right. In comparison, Elements does a better job of organizing photos easier than Lightroom.
And, with the advent of this new program there is still no unified way among the three Adobe programs that offer metadata support (Bridge, Elements, and Lightroom) to have a single catalog of keywords; nor are the keywords stored within the images themselves – so you’re always at risk of the catalogs being corrupted or destabilized.
There are also bugs with the way the interface handles multiply selected items. For instance, selecting a multiple keywords and dragging to within another keyword (Dragging “California” and “New York”, for example, under “Places”) should transform them into sub-categories. However, Lightroom, though Lightroom appears to allow multiple selections to be dragged, only one of the items is actually transformed into a sub-category. Similar problems have been reported when multiply selecting photographs from the filmstrip and applying edits to the group – only the first item gets the edits.
If you can get past the interface, Lightroom puts a lot of power in relatively easy grasp. For me, Lightroom is about the organization of images, and as such it is a mixed bag. I would call it a noble first attempt, except that Adobe has been working on helping us catalog our photos since, at least Adobe Photoshop Album, a long time ago. Beyond the editing features, there are rich ways to generate slideshows, print pages, and even web galleries. Of course, you may already have multiple programs that can handle these features (including Photoshop, itself). Is it a must-have product? It is still the best organizational tool I’ve tried for handling large photo albums. On the other hand, it needs significant polishing if it is to earn a lasting spot in the Photoshop pantheon.
