Life’s Little Irony #427: when you are a die-hard film photographer, you will invariably end up working with (or for) someone who is all-digital.
Such is the place in which I’ve found myself for the last three years. Before working for MFM, I managed a photo lab where digital prints comprised only about 25% of our output; the rest was film. It was a very hands-on experience and I loved it. I had to mix all of the chemicals, take apart and repair the machines (which was often), and –most importantly—answer customers’ questions about their pictures: “Why did they turn out so dark?” “Why are they blurry?” And my personal favorite: “I found these old negatives in a drawer. Can you restore the color on the pictures?” No sarcasm intended, those were my favorite, because you really had to understand the process of photography in order to correct pictures from old negatives.
So needless to say, I was very reluctant to learn the ropes of digital photography. All that changed when I got a Nikon DSLR from my husband for Christmas. It combined everything I loved about photography with the ease of digital. But I soon encountered another problem: I had files of photos on my computer, but didn’t want to go through the hassle of sorting through the pictures in Bridge, cleaning them up in Photoshop, and exporting them out for online use or print work. The number of steps involved felt very foreign to the more organic way of dealing with film I had gotten used to. As such, when I got a chance to get my hands on Adobe’s second release of Lightroom for this review—which boasted a much more organic workflow that was much more similar to a computer-aided version (as opposed to a “computer-design version”) of the film workflow—I jumped at the chance.
One of LR2’s new features is the Graduated Adjustment tool, where you can apply adjustable graduated filters for exposure, saturation, and much more.
Ease of Use
In their Press Kit, Adobe says that “Photoshop Lightroom is designed to be so easy that photographers can focus on their images instead of on technology.” Needless to say, they’ve definitely succeeded. Lightroom 2 is incredibly easy to learn. For most photographers who aren’t graphic designers or doing extremely stylistic work, they could make do nicely with Lightroom without having to spring for the more expensive Photoshop products. (Of course, if you do want to incorporate touchups you do in Lightroom 2 into Photoshop CS3/CS4 for print or film work, they have a very seamless workflow for that.)
LR2 can support pretty much any photo format, from the typical JPG and TIFF to RAW and DNG, as well as many more. One thing I really like about the software is that it makes importing photos wonderfully painless. Before fully importing your photos, it gives a thumbnail preview of them, so you can select the ones you want to work on, and disregard the rest. No more sifting through dozens (or hundreds) of photos trying to find the few that you like!
There are five Modules–or steps—available in the editing process: Library (survey and select imported photos), Develop (photo editing), Slideshow, Print, and Web (all relatively self-explanatory). Unlike Photoshop, where you have to navigate through menus or repeatedly open, close, or move your toolbars, almost everything in LR2 is clearly laid out for you. The right side panel contains the Options for each Module; various presets and your work history are on the left side panel; and all imported photos are visible in a filmstrip on the bottom of the screen. While all of the options, presets, and panels can be minimized or maximized as you need them, their headers are still visible, so you can easily find them when you want them.
Life’s Little Irony #427: when you are a die-hard film photographer, you will invariably end up working with (or for) someone who is all-digital. 
