By: Erik Vlietinck
Thu, April 26, 2007 - 6:48:00
Pros: 0

http://www.adobe.com
Score: ">

After having turned Photoshop Lightroom inside out, I can’t but conclude Adobe did a better job than Apple did with Aperture. Perhaps Aperture looks a bit nicer in some interface areas, but when it comes to functionality, I’ll take Lightroom any time. In Fact, Photoshop Lightroom is superior in many areas, not just cataloguing.

When Adobe made Lightroom available as a beta version, I downloaded the application as so many others, and tried it out. It somehow didn’t look like it was going to be much better than Aperture. Then came the release version and Camera RAW 4. Well, there’s no denying to it: Adobe Lightroom is faster, converts from RAW better, does that with a lot more cameras than Aperture, and has some nice extra features up its sleeve that make working with it a pleasure.

If you don’t have a mainstream camera but want to work with an Aperture- or Lightroom-alike program, then Lightroom is the only safe bet. This application converts most cameras’ RAW format and it does it with the maximum possible control. By default, Photoshop Lightroom will import your photographs from a memory card into a collection that is named by date. You can change that and call the import folder anything you like. You can also select to import the photos as Digital Negatives, which is perfect for archiving, or as JPEG, for example.

But what is truly excellent about the import feature is that it allows you to keep your photos on the card. Aperture makes it too easy to just erase your card when you’ve finished importing. Lightroom doesn’t. It handles your images much more carefully. Once the photos are in Lightroom, you can manipulate them as in any other modern cataloguing application: give them ratings, labels, flag them, add them to a Quick Collection, etc.

Keeping Your Photos Secure

The Quick Collection is particularly nice, as it speeds up your workflow considerably. Photoshop Lightroom also excels at something other: it allows you to save your photos in a folder structure on the file system, and will automatically backup your photo collections if you want that to happen. I have set up Lightroom so that it will backup photos to an offline volume once a week, but it will do this once a day, to DVDs, and everything else you care to throw at it, as well (no tape drives, though --for obvious reasons; it’s not a backup program...).

The Photoshop Lightroom interface can be customised, lights can be dimmed or turned off --I found it will even turn off the lights on both monitors simultaneously if you have multiple screens connected. The interface also enables you to follow through a logical workflow, from Library to Development to Output. The Library has some adjustment features by itself, but those are for quick adjustments.

The Develop tab is a complete Photoshop version. The only thing I miss in there is Aperture’s nicely done Loupe. In Lightroom, the loupe is a classical zoom icon --not as sexy, but it does the same thing. In Develop, you have full control over the photo. You can compare in a Before-After setup, and you have direct access to most commonly used features such as cropping, red-eye removal, etc.

The cropping feature takes some getting used to: it doesn’t work like Photoshop’s cropping tool. Instead, it will always keep the photo centered by default, which means the image will move as you change the cropping frame. This actually gives you a much better way of estimating whether a crop is what it should be.

Vibrance Adjusts Photos Carefully

Develop has everything needed to digitally develop the photograph. Vibrance is one example. Vibrance is Saturation on steroids. It works differently, allowing you to create much more vibrant looking photos without any hue shift whatsoever. White Balance setting is plain intuitive, while Tone Curve is more intuitive than in Photoshop (but it remains hard to grasp for amateurs, I guess). Tone Curve works in a number of ways: you can manipulate the curve (the Photoshop way), you can drag the sliders below the curve, or you can drag in the image and set the curve interactively.

Especially this capability --to set Tonal values and also Hue, Saturation, and Luminance interactively-- is what really sets Photoshop Lightroom apart from Aperture; it gives the user much more direct control over the image’s looks. That control is enhanced by one of the best implementations of the histogram I’ve ever seen, complete with the clipping view feature. It’s also one of those features why Lightroom is justly called “Photoshop Lightroom” in full.

Of course, the Develop tab also holds the Camera RAW calibration controls, the controls over black and white conversion, lens corrections, etc. By the way, the monochrome conversion is also one of those killer features. Although you can do better in Photoshop when using a filter like Black and White Styler from the PluginSite --which gives you even more control and power-- the mono conversion capabilities of Lightroom are extremely well done.

There are some half a dozen presets, but with the Gray tab in the Hue, Saturation, Luminance panel, you can quickly create a black and white photo from a digital colour “negative”. Using all the other controls, the monochrome result can be fine-tuned to incredibly detailed settings in terms of contrast, shadow, highlights, etc. And if you know what you’re doing, you can try to improve on Adobe’s presets by adding just a touch of colour, to create a cyanotype, for example.