Lightroom 2 rocks!

With the recent release of Lightroom version 2 my workflow and ability to do more without visiting Photoshop has improved tremendously. There are tons of reviews and articles online that will show what all the new features are about so I won’t go into that here; what I want to share is the stuff I’m personally using most.

First the Adjustment Brush. This is the single most important feature for me right now. With it I have the ability to selectively change any area of my image and see the results in real time. Things you can change with the adjustment brush include: exposure, contrast, colour, clarity etc. This is huge! Quick corrections that would have required a trip to photoshop are now done in Lightroom.

 

Sharpening has also been one of my most used features since I can export directly to online services from Lightroom (see below) and sharpen my images as they are exported.

Nested and Smart Collections deserves a mention because I’m a big fan of creating groups of shots that might have the same theme but different adjustments. All of the collections that have the same original files can now belong to a parent collection for easy retreival.

The Filter Bar at the top of the grid view is a big improvement for searching for images. I can quickly turn on and off different criteria to search my library very quickly

Finally something I just discovered that has been an huge time saver. Export to online sites. I’ve recently been more active in showing my work on Flickr and Facebook (after debating the eternal issue of theft of images vs. showing my work to more people…) and I found that there are 2 plugins that work with Lightroom v.2 that automagically send images to both of these social networking sites as well as many others. All this thanks to the new plugin architecture that Lightroom 2 offers.

The Flickr export plugin created by Jeffrey Friedl offers the same features for uploading as other stand alone programs but directly from Lightroom. It sends images to specific sets if desired and has every option you can think of when exporting images, (size, quality, tags, viewing limits, titles etc.) It’s simple to use and has saved me so much time when I want to quickly send shots to Flickr. Did I mention its FREE. Yep, free, so a big thanks to Jeffrey for his work.

 

The Facebook plugin is also from Jeffrey and although it’s in the beta stage I couldn’t believe that it worked perfectly the first time I used it. Zero problems and worked as advertised. You select your images, go to the export panel, select the options you want (including the ability to create a new album on facebook!) and off they go. Really amazing stuff.