REVIEW: Lightroom 2 Continues To Improve And Adapt (Page 5)

By the time you read this, Lightroom 2 will have graduated from public beta to shipping product, available now. Read one of the first full reviews, complete with a rundown of every new feature and some new surprises.

Picture Packages

The Print module while using the Picture Package layout engine. Click the image for a larger view.

I guess some users were clamoring for more robust Picture Package options, because you can now create your own. Go to the Print module’s new Layout Engine pane and select “Picture Package,” and you’ll get a grid layout with a new Cells pane that lets you build your own template for a picture package. The cool thing now is the fact that picture packages can be multi-page layoutsâ€”in Lightroom 1 you can have single-page templates but that’s it. I like this new Picture Package engine and I think it will work out great for photographers who are printing these kinds of things.

Print to JPEG

In the Print Job pane of the Print module, you can now specify to output to a printer or as a JPEG, if you need to send a JPEG to a lab for final printing.

Print Sharpening

Lightroom 2′s print sharpening. Click the image for a larger view.

The same algorithms that produce sharpening in the Export dialog box are also available in the Print Job pane to provide sharpening upon output from the Print module. Again, I prefer the fine controls of Photoshop’s Unsharp Mask and Smart Sharpen filters and wish Lightroom 2 would show the sharpening effect before having to commit to it.

16-bit printing

Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) users can now employ 16-bit printing.

On the horizon

Tom also mentioned several new technologies on the horizon for Lightroom, such as an SDK so third-party developers can create new Lightroom templates. New exporting plug-ins are also in the foreseeable future to allow quick and painless exporing to Flickr, Picasa and other online photo services (I would love to see something like this for Photoshop Express). Lightroom 2 has had a Plug-In Manager since the beta was released and a new Lightroom Exchange is available for easy distribution of third-party plug-ins.

In the future, the Lightroom team plans to tackle one fundamental tool for photographers: soft proofing. It’s always been a difficult thing to resolve, as Photoshop users are no doubt aware, and Tom said is an area they have been investing much time and resources into.

Conclusion

Since the public beta’s release, Lightroom 2 has had no major revisions but many small tweaks that address several of the shortcomings I saw in the beta. Compared to Lightroom 1, Lightroom 2 is a solid upgrade with a few very important new tools and a lot of little additions that some users will find indispensable (and worth the upgrade).

Lightroom 2.0
Adobe Systems
Rating: 9/10
US$299 full/US$99 upgrade

Continued On...

28 July 2008

Jeremy Schultz

Designorati

Serious issues regarding perfomance and in particular slow responses, freeze ups and crashes when using the new local adjustment tools are being reported extensively (please see Adobe Light Room Forum http://www.adobeforu...om/webx/.59b604cf/34 ). Here is what I posted there.

â€œI would like to add my voice and 12 other peoples (friends and my students that I have polled) to the debate hoping Adobe are reading this. Across 19 computers all a minimum of duo processors with bags of RAM, Windows and Macs OSâ€™s the slowness issue, freeze-ups and crashes especially with the new local adjustments tools are exactly as being described in these posts. As a computer â€œguruâ€ I have to believe there is a serious code issue that only Adobe can resolve. The various suggested workarounds such as rebuilding previews, turning off Auto mask can help ease the situation but will not resolve what I and many believe to be serious flaws. Hope Adobe is reading and listening to this. What is strange is that LR 2.0 is slower and buggier than the Beta version.â€

This is what I added when I posted on Scott Kelby’s blog at NAPP

“In my opinion NAPP is the worlds best Adobe advocate (and for me the best association I belong to) I hope that Scott and the great NAPP team are aware of what is being said and can look into the problems and see what Adobe are doing about it. I LOVE the product and the promise it holds BUT I have had to go back to LR 1.4 (bohoo) since I cannot afford the time it takes on any of my 3 computers with LR 2.0″

So if anyone is having problems especially with the bad responses when using the new tools please add your comments and confirm this. By having enough people speak up perhaps Adobe will put a priority on this and get a ver 2.1 out soon.

I Have been using Photoshop even before it had a version number and have great faith in Adobe solving the problem but hope it is sooner than later.

Peter

06 August 2008
I had screen corruption after i installed lightroom 2 on a macbook pro 2GHz intel duo and tiger 10.4.11. I removed the previous version of lightroom 1.4.1 thinking that it could conflict ,it made no difference even in single screen mode i checked the screen profiles and found it erratically change between profiles and eventually my calibrated profiles just vanished. When i had the screen return for short periods every time i open a image it would hang and crash just changing modules or when i made any adjustment or used tools .I have reinstalled the operating system no extras and updated and it still crashes even with only 12 images but no further screen corruption it is unusable ,i have a windows copy but as yet have not installed this as i have seen problems on other forums and i have wasted enough hours on this, reliability in software is very important to me and is key to any photographer .

MARC LITTLEWOOD

04 September 2008
Peter – I agree with you in that I love the product and it’s potential…I’ve been using 1.0 since it came out. That being said, after installing 2.0, I’ve had nothing but issues. This is a huge concern to me for my business as my productivity and efficiency have been severly affected.

I get out of memory errors, bad color profiles, I can’t use the local adjustment tools without waiting 15-30 seconds before it kicks in and often times it will just crash completely for no apparent reason, freeze up and I have to terminate the process…not even ending the task will close it out. I’m shocked and pretty angry at Adobe for releasing this version with so many bugs that it is hardly usable…I have 18,000 images in my catalog and 1.4 had no problem cruising through all of them with speed. 2.0 just crashes every time I try to do anything quickly.

Noah

13 October 2008
I too like the product but have had many issues with the slideshows, when trying to set up to show product to clients. I keeps bouncing back and starting again even with the repeat box not checked. Bloody bollocks i say. Hope that the update i downloaded tonight helps with that.

David

26 October 2008
I am another photographer who sees also the potential for LR, but am very reluctant to upgrade from 1.4 to the current 2.1 – and for many of the same reasons: the trial program crashes when encountering certain images…could be that the program isn’t sure where the images are and just doesn’t display the fact that the link is broken? or what? Also, I just lost 3 hours of meticulous work trying to sort my images into collections only to suddenly have them all just disappear!!! Poof…didn’t even crash, just wiped out all the collections. When you call adobe, they have guys in India (apparently) who are not much help (to put it mildly). Guess I won’t upgrade any time soon!!!!

Peter Dustrud

08 December 2008
Same here, I cannot understand why the adjustment tool crashes everytime I use it, I haven’t had a chance to finish even one of my pictures. It’s a big dissapointment for me as I was hoping to use Lightroom for commercial purposes. Hope this will get fixed. Please note that I have a quite decent PC for this kind of application (AMD Athlon 5200+ Processor, 4GB of RAM and 512 of video memory), so it’s definately not because of lack of resourses.

Eller

09 August 2009