Mini-review of Lightroom 2…

I’ve been using Lightroom to manage my photos now for nearly a year. I’m by no means an expert, but here are some of the pros and cons that I’ve accumulated.

Pros

Awesome Image Adjustments

This is Adobe, after all. Lightroom’s image adjustments are top-notch. Easy to manipulate, they’re fast, and fairly intuitive. It’s got the typical auto-tone, and good auto-white balance. But also has a tone curve control (not unlike Photoshop’s) and a nice split-toning control. This was the primary reason that I chose the tool, since I’m still a newb and often screw things up (like getting the exposure right—which I’ve gotten much better at lately!).

Smart Collections

I like the fact that I can build collections from the tags. I’m still not using this feature as much as I should be, but I like having it when I want it.

Printing Options

The printing mode is very nice in that you have quite a bit of control over page layout and such. I’ve not used this nearly as much because I don’t have a photo printer, but when I have, it’s been easy to use.

Cons

Poor Performance

Making the image adjustments is fast, and you can tell they spent a lot of time on it. Unfortunately, it’s the only thing that feels fast. Switching modes takes a long time. Browsing doesn’t go nearly as fast as I’d hope (it takes quite some time for the images to show the thumbnails, despite the fact that I chewed up the extra disk space to render them). This has been really disappointing, and it has me thinking about switching to Aperture, to be frank about it.

No Support for Photoshop Plugins

So, when you name a tool “Adobe Photoshop Lightroom,” I have a few expectations. The one that’s foremost, is the ability to use Photoshop features in Lightroom, even if it means I have to own Photoshop to do it.

Unfortunately, that just isn’t the case. It’s got a decent workflow between the two tools: you can open up an image in Photoshop from Lightroom, and have the new image imported into Lightroom immediately. And you can run some Photoshop actions using a “droplet,” but you can only do that on export.

My hope early on was that Adobe would make it easy for companies that wrote Photoshop plugins to port them to Lightroom. As it stands right now: the only thing you can write plugins for are export actions and the web stuff. That’s it. Not very useful, IMHO.

The lack of built-in support for third party plugins for things like noise reduction, also has me thinking about switching to Aperture. At least the stuff that I currently want, is readily available as a plugin for Aperture.

Navigation

I’m a bit disappointed about how I generally have to navigate my way through my photo collection in Lightroom. The only real way to do it is via the folder/collection tree in the left-hand pane. I’d rather be able to point-and-click within the main viewing area though. Once again, Aperture lets me do that.

Can’t Get My Raw Files Back From DNG

Yes, you can do this using an external tool, and Adobe does provide it. But I can’t do it directly from Lightroom, and that bugs me.

Where I Stand

I’m very much on the fence about this tool. I really like the ability to make localized corrections, and I really like Lightroom’s image adjustments. I’ve tried to wait out the issues of performance, and the lack of plugins. I’m going to wait a little longer, but I have a feeling I’ll be switching to Aperture. At the moment, it looks like my personal workflow would be better if I were using Aperture.