I originally did this review when Lightroom was launched and posted it on www.rockforum.co.uk . Thought it may be of interest to others here


Adobe Photoshop Lightroom


Introduction

I recently downloaded a trial version of Photoshop Lightroom as I need a RAW development tool and image manipulator. At ~£140 retail it is quite an attractive package and cheap as Adobe's software goes, an educational licence is ~£80 but has licence limitations which mean it cannot be used for commercial purposes. A word of warning though, Adobe have been very clever about their pricing which is only an 'introductory' offer, 2/3rds the 'normal' price. Installed it takes up a very small 64MB of hard disk space leaving you with disk space for the important things, your photographs. The program has a very small memory footprint of 50MB in the library to 200MB when working with 6MP RAW images (I assume 10-12MP RAW images will push up the memory footprint further, probably to over 400MB). It can tie in directly with Photoshop CS2 but Elements has all the extra functionality I need for minor drawing changes (preferring to have the image as 'natural' as possible, unless it is a composite). When you start it up it has a small introduction/tutorial which shows you where to find the various tools. It is just five short pages with minimal text just to get you used to navigating a new piece of software. One of the best things about Lightroom is that it is completely non-destructive, it never changes the original images and only saves adjustments in its own library. These settings can be exported to create a new file if you want to share a final piece.


Basics

The GUI is very visually appealing and unobtrusively, the black and grey backgrounds with grey text ensure minimal colour interference with the images you are viewing. The thumbnail view, called the Navigator, where you can see overall changes and viewing area is found in the upper left hand corner. You have a live preview of your image centre screen with various zoom options found above the thumbnail pane. The view zoom setting are unfortunately limited to Fit, Fill, 1:1 1:4, 1:3, 1:2, 2:1, 3:1, 4:1, 8:1, and 11:1 completely lacking custom settings. The Left hand toolbar tends to have Library and History information while the Right had toolbar actually has the useful tools and settings. The lower part of the screen has a small film-strip of your selected shoot that you wish to work on. This set-up remains the basis of all the different sections of the program.

The toolbars are quite wide and at 1024x768 take up most of your workroom. You can use a keyboard shortcut to hide them but it seems a bit pointless when you have to bring them back to make changes. This means that on a low resolution monitor your preview area at 1:1 is very limited. Bumping up the resolution to 1280x1024, that of most 17” and 19” TFT monitors, you get the same amount of preview and toolbar space. This program is certainly not designed to work well at these low resolution and I wouldn't recommend using it at anything less than 1440x900 or 1440x1050. Professional photographers for whom the product is designed will generally use a multiple screen set-up or high resolution set-ups of 1600x1200 or greater. Unfortunately I've been unable to appropriate a screen with DVI input to test multiple monitor use, and I've lost my DVI-VGA adapter. It may seem trivial to some that the program works best when used on current 20”-30” monitors but this does leave some people in a difficult working situation. I found that working at 1680x1050 and 1920x1200 there is plenty of space for toolbars and preview.


Performance

Even on an AMD Athlon64 X2 4800+ with 2GB RAM the program is a little slow, especially when using the dust tool. It is an automatic system by default which scans the nearby area for as near a pixel match that is even (no dust). In the library screen it can take a while to load the thumbnails, especially from a large RAW shoot. I would have thought it could cache these but unfortunately that seems not to be the case. When in the develop screen my CPU throttled up to 2.4GHz (from idle 0.8GHz) even though the program only seems to use a maximum of 50% of the cycles and an average of 15%. I found my system was a bit more responsive if I set Lightroom's affinity to a single core. Lightroom is supposedly multi-threaded and multi-core aware, can't really test this in any other way other than setting the core affinity though.


Getting Started

First thing you need to do is build your library, whether your library is a complete mess or it is well organised Lightroom has the option to build a new copy with a new folder structure and nomenclature system or rearrange your existing collection. With 7GB (2000) of RAW and JPEG files (just the ones I have on my internal hard disk) I set it to arrange by Year/Month/Date and rename all the photographs by sequence-date. This process took about 20 minutes to complete and all the images taken with a stand alone camera were well organised and structured. I did have some folders with pictures from my old phone which had rather strange dates of 2001 even though the phone was bought in 2004. I moved them manually and set their library location manually (even though I'm never likely to edit or print them I wanted them organised). Selecting a shoot in the library for a specific date is easy with the expandable menu system (think Windows Explorer). Once selected you can move into a different working screen, these are Library, Develop, Slideshow, Print and Web. Most of these are pretty self explanatory but they have some features which are worth looking into in more detail.


Program Details

Library screen
This screen is used to explore your photo collection and individual shoots as well as manage locations and other settings. Navigation is conducted with the left toolbar and has the full library, folders, collections (photos grouped in the Lightroom library) and keyword tags used for searching. You can select a whole set of thumbnail views of varying sizes and arrangements. The right toolbar contains metadata, EXIF, notes and other information about the image selected. At the top of the tool bar is the histogram showing individual channels and luminance with a few basic settings such as white balance (WB), exposure and vibrance. You also have a menu for setting keywords so images can be found quickly without knowing the date of the shoot.

Development screen
This is where most work will get done when using Lightroom. On the left you have the navigator, pre-set filters, snapshots and change history. The navigator (thumbnail) has been previously explained and appears on every screen. Pre-set filters are those for creating film effect changes such as sepia or tone changes which are quick modifications. Snapshots are based on the history of changes made to the photograph and are created manually to find the favoured adjustments for an image. The history of changes is fully traceable and is only cleared by hand by pressing the clear button (this can be undone). The history allows for individual changes to be viewed but they do take up space so once the desired effect is achieved there is no need to keep those changes tracked. The final changes will be saved and will be visible on the various sliders and it is always possible to go back and make further adjustments or remove them.

The right toolbar contains a large subset of tools and menus starting with the histogram and Basic adjustments. The histogram can be dragged is certain areas to the same effect as Basic adjustments. These include WB: temperature and tint; Tone: EV exposure adjustment, highlight recovery, dark to light fill, black increment, brightness, contrast, vibrance and saturation. These are the basis on which most adjustments will be made with the sliders or entering a value to apply manually. You can also display highlight and shadow clipping to make sure your adjustments don't overexpose or underexpose areas, or to make corrections in existing problem areas. There is limited use of these features on a jpeg as they have a very limited amount of compressed data. A lot of noise can be generated if large changes are made. Working with RAW files is much easier as they have a lot more data a lot of which is 'hidden' in the upper and lower dynamic ranges. Much larger adjustments can be made without affecting the quality of the image too much but it is still best to get the main photo you want from your camera.

The next menu is the tone curve where you can adjust the linearity of colour progression. This is basically the same as colour adjustment for monitors but only gives you the option of changing all channels simultaneously. Nothing is lost with only luminance chances as colour adjustment can be made in several other menus; specifically, the colour adjustment menu that follows. This menu gives you access to a large range of hue, saturation and luminance changes for each channel and even intermediate points such as orange or aqua. Continuing with colour adjustment the next menu allows to change the hue of the highlights and shadows, or evenly if the changes are made for both.

Now we come to the camera correction menus, a selection of tools to correct noise, and lens aberrations. The noise reduction is quite disappointing as it only seems to soften the image in two different ways rather than analysing the image of noise and correcting it properly. There are a number of tools which are much better at correction noise on the market so if you use high ISO settings this may not be for you. The vignette correction is something I didn't need to use but having played with it briefly it seems to apply the basic menu changes to a more limited area to correct for the shadow of under-exposure that vignette shows. It seems to work quite effectively although the availability of a high contrast switch for initial fine tuning of the adjustment area would have been very handy. A useful tool is that for correcting chromatic aberrations caused by lower quality zoom lenses. Effectiveness depends on the breadth of the aberration, some will be fully corrected while others will have a remnant cast of colour. It seems very good for correcting up to 5 pixel widths effectively but if the background is overexposed then it may still have some colouration.

The final menu is Camera Calibration and is aimed at individuals who shoot RAW. It allows for each sensor output type (from a standard RGB Bayer array) to be adjusted for saturation and hue. It is a kind of advanced WB which can also be used for a number of other effects. I found limited use for this in my particular case, and found you can achieve the same effects in other ways.

Slideshow screen
The slideshow screen is for preparing presentations of photo shoots, it has a preview thumbnail in the usual position and a small selection of presentation templates. It is a basic automated package which generates a slideshow in a given or random order. It has the ability to have a soundtrack attached so it can be left as an automated presentation at a gallery or exhibition. Text can be added to each slide in most presentation set-ups and the position and coverage of the image adjusted. Most of it is quite standard and brings nothing you couldn't achieve with Impress of PowerPoint. It may save some people time but you can't embed everything you might like into a presentation as it is for photos like the rest of the package.

Print screen
This section is a print arrangement tool which will allow a user to quickly set up printing. It has a reasonable array of presents and is completely customisable. It detects the capabilities of your printer by its driver which sets the limitations. There is not much to say about this as it is just a fancy print menu and preview.

Web screen
This module is for uploading automatically produced HTML and Flash galleries with copyright watermarks added. These can be uploaded directly to an FTP server for displaying on a website. There are plenty of web publishing programs which will allow production of much more flexible custom galleries. This feature is for those who are inexperienced with HTML or who need to quickly publish work to the web with little hassle. Even then the limited choice of how the final product looks is not very good if you want to produce a unique website.


Conclusion
The main elements of this software package are very good and easy to use. Everything can be done in a short timespan, no time is wasted. After a shoot you don't really want to spend hours adjusting photos by hand. Creating a pre-set for batch correction of lighting saves even more time. My time spent using it has been quite enjoyable, you can seamlessly move from one module to the next as your work progresses. The biggest issues with this package is that it tries to do everything and is limited in many ways. The Slideshow and Web features may save some time but you can achieve much more when you actually put time and effort into their production. For half the price there are other software packages such as SilkyPix which have a similar feature set for photo development. However, most other packages lack the compatibility with a wide array of formats and cameras (With SilkyPix hardly any cameras are supported). It is a single package that tries to bring together all the parts of digital processing, for direct shooting is is very effective. However, you will require an image editor to make more artistic changes and produce composites, stitches or panoramas. Lightroom is only in version 1.0 as it was released just a few months ago, I can see it progressing to become much more developed as seen from transition of Adobe Camera RAW plug-in to Lightroom.


Personally I am leaning towards Lightroom as my preferred RAW developer and library. I hope to test a few more before making a final decision but with an imminent price rise I may end up going with the 'industry standard' Adobe.

Pictures

Showing recovery of highlights from a JPEG as well as using the dust removal tool to remove dust not on the CCD but on the mirror!

Original Image



Exported Edit - Ghost in the Mirror



Chromatic aberration correction - Unfortunately, this image is also 'burned' around the edges (not the best lens) which is much harder to correct but the correction is still visible.





Noise reduction - this has been blown up 4:1 so the effect can be seen easily. The clean-up is very poor indeed... (If you have an LCD display it may not be visible)



Screenshots (Although these can be found on-line)

Pictures were taken on a Fuji FinePix S20Pro in Fuji RAW or JPEG format, 6MP interpolated from 2x3MP.

PS. About a month after I wrote this I bit the bullet and got Lightroom as I felt it was worth it.

True, but with the huge pricing scandal that is Adobe I think it is best to stick to what you have at the moment. If you need to buy from new then there is not much point in going for an older version. If upgrading what a while and see if anyone sues Adobe first.

Having several renders in one file will still be quite large, exporting multiple files with the correct pre-adjustments from a digital darkroom and then using an old version of Photoshop or even Elements can give excellent results and not affect the original files. Depends how much storage space you have to work with on your computer.

Also depends what exactly you want to do, I can't see much of a reason to upgrade. However, buying from new I'd probably go for CS3 as the price difference isn't that large.

www.warehouseexpress.co.uk are also very good, reliable and fast.

Had just asked a question in a different topic as you had mentioned it. Am tempted by the 50-200 even with no DSLR yet... Bit silly really...

the 21mm Limited is expensive but so are most wide angles. Some people are willing to fork out £400 for a good piece of glass. Others will be content with something a bit more 'basic'. It is the smallest and lightest 21mm you can get, so what do you expect? But as a stop gap waiting for some new zooms? Nobody's going to want one in that situation (unless they are also collecting primes).

Never used ebay and am worried that nobody would want to take payment from a noob user with no rating. Either way, I've got no camera just yet so not much point in getting lenses just yet. If I had an AF Pentax already there'd be no problem but I've got good old manuals, which have not seen use in some time. How much were you hoping to get for it?

I am in the same situation minus the K10D, have been holding off for these lenses and don't want to get a stop gap. Admittedly we may need the stop gap as my partner also wants a K10D and we'd both use the 16-50 focal range more than anything else. This means two expensive identical lenses, or someone ends up with 'el cheapo'.

I can see her wanting the 50-200 as well because the 50-135 isn't really long enough. Or maybe even the 75-300 that is still available at SRS. Don't know which one has better glass though as both are similarly priced.

I am going to get the K10D, stick it out with an SMC-A 24-50mm and SMC-A 50mm.

When the first two DA*s arrive I hope to be ready. If they arrive soon and in short supply I'll be peeved off as I'm not likely to get one. I hope prices won't be too inflated over the US where they are going to be £450 and £500 equivalent. I'm hoping they are £550 and £600 over here, no higher.

They are already listed on the Pentax UK website so hopefully not long.

KA mount lenses feature automatic aperture controlled by the body, although you can set it to manual on the aperture ring if you wish. I think that the aperture will appear on the display of all Pentax DSLRs. I can't test this as my K10D isn't here yet... K mount lenses without automatic aperture settings won't show any information and you must set it manually and use the metering with the aperture stopped down.

At least that is my understanding of it having read the manual and looked up various things.

I'm really not sure... I don't mind carrying around two or three 'large' zoom lenses. This is especially true when i want a 'rugged' system for middle of nowhere locations and cross-country travel by foot.

I do want to get a few pancakes for the light day out but there is a limited selection for a 'natural' viewing angle with the cropped sensors. The 21mm is 32.3mm which is quite good, but then next step up is 40mm which is 61.2. The Limited 31mm is just about right at 47.43mm equivalent but expensive.