Adobe Lightroom

 

I'm only devoting a post to Adobe Lightroom for completeness sake since I still have a copy of version 5.0 on my hard drive.  I have to say at the outset, though, that this is an app I very rarely access; anything comments I might make about it will therefore necessarily be extremely limited in scope.

I purchased Adobe Lightroom almost immediately upon the release of version 1.0 in 2007 when it was offered for an introductory price of only $99, and I upgraded to subsequent editions through 5.0 which is the version I still have on my computer.  The app is, of course, now bundled with Photoshop in Adobe's Creative Cloud subscription packages where it is, somewhat confusingly, offered in two different versions, Lightroom Classic and Lightroom CC.  Since I've never used either of these I'm not the best person to ask concerning the differences between the two, but from what I understand Classic is closest to the old standalone versions while CC is more simplified and allows users to more easily move back and forth between Lightroom and Photoshop over a variety of devices.

The truth is that I never felt very comfortable working in Lightroom in the first place.  It always seemed unnecessarily cumbersome to me, a drawback that Adobe itself seems to have acknowledged in developing the CC version as an alternative to the Classic.  For one thing, I never had any real use for the Catalog feature or the use of keywords.  I don't believe photographers, even those with a huge number of images in their files, have any real need for these if they are organized in their work habits.  I myself have always been able to keep track of my images fairly easily using Adobe Bridge that's now apparently a free download from Adobe. (More on that in my next post.)

As far as editing is concerned, my goal when processing RAW images is simply to achieve a correct image, that is, one whose histogram is fully balanced with no shadow detail lost and no highlights clipped.  Though I might (very) occasionally apply a preset, I prefer to do the bulk of my editing in Photoshop or a similar program rather than a RAW processor.  Not that Lightroom doesn't have some very robust editing features.  But again, if one wishes to use the Develop module one has to first access the image via the libraries and catalogs.

Of course, most of the above simply reflects my personal preferences, and I'm sure the program has improved dramatically since the release of the 5.0 version I have on my computer.  After all, there are many outstanding photographers who have made Lightroom an essential component of their workflow and have achieved excellent results with it.  One has only to browse the many You Tube tutorials to see how versatile an app it actually is.  I certainly would not want to dissuade anyone from using it.