Review: Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 photo management

Following a four-month public beta, Adobe has released Photoshop Lightroom 2, the second version of its advanced photo-management application.

If you’re a Lightroom 1.4 user, the major benefits an upgrade will confer include local adjustment brushes allowing exposure and other adjustments to be applied to parts of the image, improved volume management which simplifies and enhances handling of offline image files, more flexible output options and tighter Photoshop integration.

Until now there has been a line in the sand defining the respective functions of management applications such as Lightroom and editing applications such as Photoshop, restricting the former’s editing tools to global adjustments such as exposure, colour control and sharpening. Lightroom’s new Adjustment brush crosses that line and will no doubt be part of a continuing trend.

Eight effects can be applied with the brush, including exposure, saturation, clarity and colour. A ‘soften skin’ preset combines clarity and sharpness adjustments in a custom brush – you can also define and save your own custom brush presets. An ‘auto mask’ option intelligently masks parts of the image as you paint, restricting the adjustment to colours sampled from under the brush, to apply adjustments to individual elements.

Another new tool that is likely to replace more involved Photoshop retouching is the graduated filter, which applies the same adjustments as the brush using a linear gradient mask. In most cases this is going to be used as a digital graduated neutral density filter, darkening and adding saturation to skies without affecting foreground detail in landscape shots.

The Library module has been redesigned with a cleaner workspace that offers more information about your images than the old layout. The folders panel displays online and offline volumes and can be configured to display used/available disk space, number of photos or online status. A new filter bar displayed in the Library grid view allows you to whittle down a folder of images on the basis of a text, attribute or metadata filter. The filter bar is both immensely powerful and easy to use. You can text search any metadata field, or confine it to specific data, keywords, or captions for example.

The metadata search provides four configurable columns in which all available metadata from the image selection is listed. You then just select the criteria you want – photos shot on Wednesday 4 April with your EOS 20D using a 70-200mm zoom for example.

Getting images to and from Photoshop is another area where big improvements have been made. It’s no longer necessary to create a TIFF or PSD file for opening in Photoshop. Images can be opened as Photoshop Smart Objects, and multiple images can be opened for panorama stitching or merging to produce a high dynamic range composite.

A new picture package layout engine for printing multiple copies of the same image has been added to the existing enhanced print module, (renamed contact sheet/grid). As well as 16-bit printing, adaptive output sharpening can be applied on the basis of image resolution as well as output media.

Other additions and enhancements include dual monitor output, 64-bit OS support for Windows Vista and Mac OS 10.5, and plug-in support. The plug-in SDK is limited to export and web gallery plug-ins, edit plug-ins of the kind introduced in Aperture 2.1 don’t appear to be part of Adobe’s plan for Lightroom, at least not for now.

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