What is Lightroom ?

[Guest flatfour]

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There sems to be a lot of talk about Adobe Lightroom. What does it do ? Is it a replacement for Photoshop or is it just a storage system ? Or is it alot more than that ?

[DaveEP]

There sems to be a lot of talk about Adobe Lightroom. What does it do ? Is it a replacement for Photoshop or is it just a storage system ? Or is it alot more than that ?

 

 

Lightroom is not a replacement for photoshop, unless you only use a tiny number of photoshop features (which it appears a great meny people to).

 

Lightroom has some features that Photoshop does not have - like built in database tracking on your shots, with keywording, metatag searching etc etc. Is also has stacking for stacking multiple shots that are similar, making only one visible at a time (if that is what you want - you can also view the entire stack or even unstanck the shots).

 

Lightroom includes a good RAW converter, cropping, rotation, leveling, clone/heal that is good for removing dust spots, but not as good as Photoshop when entired objects of people can be replaced.

 

If includes some (limited) printing support and (limited) slideshow features.

 

Lightroom is a digitam asset management (DAM) program with extra features (e.g. RAW, clone/heal etc), that can be used for 95% of the things that you would do to the average shot.

 

Photoshop is still needed if you want more complete control over the manuipulation of images.

 

For me, Lightroom has replaced Bridge, and finally added a little DAM to my workflow.

[Guest flatfour]

Thanks David, and thanks Stuart for directing me to a Lightroom review.

[Cindy Flood]

This is a list of excellent videos that will give you some idea of the features and power of Lightroom: Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Tutorials by Michael Tapes