Adobe Lightroom: Opinions from users?

Hi,

Have the opportunity if I wish to purchase this software in the Student Edition...... Seeing as I am once again a student...

I'm currently using Picassa and while it is ok, the editing is pretty poor I think. Especially when trying to remove dust spots. Unfortunately I think my house is just too dusty for my Dslr to not have plenty of these over the sensor. Sadly.

My main interest is how good the touch up tools are and if it has any automated tool to remove dust? I may have imagined that this type of tool exists?

Dust spotting is pretty good (clone or heal options). You can copy and paste the dust spotting from one image to others.

I agree - and the noise control is superb!
Andy

Lightroom is a very powerful programme and very easy to use, in fact I would say that the programme covers virtually every angle for a photographer. Photoshop is obviously all bells and whistles, but it does cost a lot of hard earned pennies. If you can take advantage as a student and pay less for Lightroom you can't go wrong. also lots of nice plugins available such as Nik software.

LR3 is excellent and makes sorting,batch processing and cataloguing so much easier

Got mine at student and teacher price courtesy of my wife working in an education establishment

Would suggest buying a guide book to accompany it, I have the Scott Kelby one and its very good

I use lightroom - took me a while to get used to it and I tend to keep "tweaking" to a minimum and I love lightroom - at that osrt of price go for it

Loghtroom is great, except when it is slow. Wouldn't use anything else though.

It's not slow on a 64bit system.

Well, I do abuse the spot removal tool.

I love spot removal abuse! You can make some really drastic edits just using that.

It does slow down even running from a 400MB/s Read 200MB/s Write SSD on 4 cores and 4GB of RAM 64-bit system. Probably need more RAM and an SSD to store the working photo files.

Another vote for LR3 - Its all I use for my editing (although I'm considering adding silver efex as a plug in).

Spot removal tool isn't bad at all. I prefer photoshop version (had a demo for a bit) but for most things LR3 works great. I just like the potential for adding a bit of mood/atmosphere to a shot with the bonus that its bloody easy to use.

Main machine I run it on is a 27" iMac and I don't have any problems with speed - as long as the images I'm working on are on the main drive.

I'd like to get into CS5 and all that layers and masks carry on but in the meantime LR3 (at student prices) is superb.

I very highly recommend the Silverefex plugin.

Well, I'm pretty much set now. Going to pull the trigger! Thanks very much guys!

good stuff - let us know how you get on

Lightroom will be an excellent choice for your images.

A vacuum cleaner would be a better option for your house.

I very gently applied a glasses cleaning cloth to the sensor last night and hopefully got the two really annoying bits of dust out of the way!

The house just seems to breed dust very quickly.....