Lightroom 2 Beta

I just downloaded the Lightroom 2 beta and have started to play with the new features.

I am very happy to have a controlled brush to only change exposure, brightness, saturation, clarity and tint on part of the image. It is controlled because once it has changed that area you can't run over it again with the brush and overdo the correction. This is especially useful when you don't want to use fill light which can be somewhat destructive to other parts of the image to bring out shadow detail or when you want to pull down some highlights but not change other parts of the image.

This is the only improvement I have noticed.

CA correction is still not anywhere near as good as other programs. It can't correct any of the CAs caused by my terrible 50-200 which has blue yellow CA of more than 10 pixel widths around a lot of edges.

The rest has received minor alterations which don't really seem to affect my usage. I hope the upgrade price is not too high as the brush tool is exactly what I need and it is the only major change. It is something which should have been included in the original.

I can't help thinking Adobe are playing catch up again following the recent release of Aperture 2. I'm still using Lightroom but it needs to support plug-ins if I'm to continue with it. Aperture is now at £129.00 so I'm tempted to switch .........

One thing I really like is the post-crop vignetting.

As many, I used the lens correction tool for vignetting in a reverse manner to darken the corners of my images which often helps bringing out the subject located more in the center. However, in case of cropped images this didn't always work nicely, esp. when cropped off center.

The new post-crop vignetting applies the tool after crop, so it can be used in a much more flexible and creative way. Exactly what I wanted!!!

I also like the improved print sharpening, though I will reserve my judgement until I see real results. Being able to print to JPG should be great for printerless people struggling to get consistent lab prints.

Wim

I liked the new vignette tool as well. Lightroom is supposed to support plugins, the only thing is the SDK has been slow to be released and nobody really knows how to make plugins for it at the moment.

I use a combination of Lightroom and Silkypix depending on what I want to achieve and how much time I want/have to spend on a particular image, I love Lightrooms workflow and output options but Silkypix is the better converter, especially for difficult images (i.e. underexposed, high iso etc).

Now!! if we had an app with Lightrooms workflow coupled with Silkypix's engine, IMO that would be the killer app.