Photoshop Lightroom A Mature And Successful App (Page 3)

PRESENTATION, PART 1: SLIDESHOWS

Slideshows are wonderful, and a version or two ago Adobe made PDF presentations possible: a PDF that can run through its pages as if they were a slideshow. Photoshop got onto the bandwagon with CS2 (look in File –> Automate for PDF Presentation) and Lightroom has as well. Once you have your images selected from the Library and properly developed, the Slideshow module allows one to create a PDF presentation and with a lot more control:

• Add strokes and drop shadows to photos
• Include your identity plate and position it where you want it—even underneath your photos if they overlap
• Show ratings
• Add any metadata (EXIF or IPTC) as a text overlay
• Backgrounds: add a color wash or a photo
• Add a musical soundtrack from iTunes, either a playlist or your entire library (downside: you can’t specify individual songs)
• Tweak the slide duration and randomize the order if you like

There are already a few slideshow templates packaged with Lightroom—look for them in the Template Browser panel in the Slideshow module. Another good thing about Lightroom: almost anything you can do to a photo can be saved as a preset or template.

The Slideshow module is great, but it can be better; you’ll note that there are a couple downsides evident with the Slideshow options. It’s already a wonderful tool for photographers, but my experience with creative professionals is that they want to control every detail when presenting their work—the portfolio or slideshow is itself a part of their body of work, and every detail is worth customizing. Photoshop’s Flash galleries are a great example: my article on these galleries generated a ton of responses asking questions about modifying all kinds of elements—even though these templates were designed for quick-and-easy web galleries. I hope to write a follow-up piece about modifying Lightroom’s presentation PDFs and web galleries beyond what the Lightroom interface can do.

PRESENTATION, PART 2: PRINTING

Figure 7: Creating a contact sheet within Lightroom.

For years, Photoshop has had the capability of creating photo packages and contact sheets for printing (again, look in File –> Automate) but they have been merely okay or, in the case of the Photo Package option, outdated and not a lot of fun to use. Lightroom has an improved print engine that’s easier to use and more versatile. The identity plate is still available for branding your prints, and you can tweak your print layouts in a variety of ways including strokes, frame auto-fill, margins, grids, cell spacing and sizes. The Print module works really well if you are wanting to create prints of individual photos or contact sheets, but photo packages can be tricky because you can’t have multiple image sizes on the same page. This is a deficiency that Photoshop’s Picture Package feature can handle.

There are also color management setting available during the print job, such as settings for resolution, profile and rendering intent. I am glad these are here and they will help many who use the software, though for high-end output I am not sure the Print Job panel will satisfy elite professionals. For best results, I think these setting should be tinkered with so they produce great output on a local printer (perhaps an photo inkjet printer) and then use it for that purpose.

PRESENTATION, PART 3: WEB GALLERIES

Figure 8: Creating a web gallery in Lightroom. Note that the one shown here is a Flash template, one of ten Lightroom offers. These make excellent photo galleries.

Like I mentioned a moment ago, Photoshop’s web galleries are very popular among designers trying to get their work out to potential clients on the Internet—and the addition of Flash gallery templates in CS and CS2 have proven very popular though hard to customize. Lightroom provides a Web module that makes web gallery creations pretty easy to do, and the templates they include have ten Flash-based galleries. Lightroom can actually play these Flash galleries—proof that Adobe has integrated Flash technology throughout its product line. Colors, text and other elements can be changed easily with the panels, but those who want to add text and do things the templates don’t expect will have as hard a time as if they were creating their gallery in Photoshop. Templates are designed so all that work isn’t necessary, but many people are searching for the easy way out with templates while demanding control over every element. If Adobe wants the popularity of their templates to skyrocket, they should allow users to edit everything on the page and add whatever they want, wherever they want. I am not sure that’s a feasible goal (if you want a custom Flash gallery, hire a Flash designer) but it is what the people want.

Adobe took the Web module a step further and built in an FTP browser—allowing easy transfer of files to a remote server. If you are showing your gallery online and need to make changes to it, simply make the changes and then click the Upload button. Lightroom takes care of the rest! I am surprised no one had really thought of this before (another great innovation by the Lightroom team), but it’s here now I hope other software engineers take notice. Aperture does something similar, but of course it only works with a .mac site, which Apple provides for a fee. Lightroom will upload photos to any server—making it more versatile and valuable.

Tom Hogarty, Lightroom product manager, also told me they are working on ways to make Lightroom more extensible—and users are already figuring out how to make their own custom templates. LightroomGalleries.com is probably your best online resource for customizing Lightroom templates, and there is also some good information about this over at seanmcfoto.com. Both these sites also offer good information for Lightroom in general.

CONCLUSION

Photoshop Lightroom is brand-new, but it feels mature—maybe a 2.0 or even a 3.0. A lot of thought has gone into this product and it shows. That’s not to say there are ways to improve it—my review alone uncovered some missed opportunities and others that were not quite met—but it doesn’t have far to go. My experience with Aperture 1.0, on the other hand, was less solid; most of this was due to the fact that Aperture needed a lot of computing power to run well and ran poorly on lesser machines. Lightroom has no such handicaps. Aperture has become a leaner application since I reviewed it in 2005, but Lightroom beats it handily when it comes to minimum system requirements and smooth performance. If you need Aperture or Lightroom and are using a machine more than 18 months old, Lightroom may be your only real option.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 1.0
Adobe Systems
US $299