Adobe Lightroom is good software. Adobe rethought the digital photo workflow a few years back, tossing out the chaos of Bridge and Photoshop. And they got it right. Lightroom is like Picasa, Aperture, and iPhoto in that it's as much about managing a library of photos as editing any individual image. But from what I've seen Aperture is the only other tool close to touching Lightroom's professionalism.

If there's one downside to Lightroom it's that it's a bit confusing to learn this new way of doing things. I still don't really understand what all it can do. But it does a good job easing new users in and the basic things you need to do are easy and, well, basic. Import photos. Mark the good ones. Edit them a bit. Export them to Flickr. All easy to do.

I have special love for Lightroom today because I just migrated all my stuff over to my Mac and it couldn't have been easier. My Windows serial number activated the Mac copy, no fuss. All of Lightroom's metadata about everything I've ever done in the .lrcat catalog. My edits, tags, titles, all in this one single file. It's portable. I simply copied the catalog and my image files to the Mac, told Lightroom where the photos had moved, and I was done. Stress free and transparent.

Lightroom's not cheap, often $300 retail. But it goes on sale occasionally; right now it's available for $145 on Amazon, as good a price as you're likely to see. There's also a generous free trial program. There's also a good third party geocoding plugin.

techgood
  2011-08-30 00:48 Z