Depth of Options
First of all, please keep in mind that this software is for editing and cleaning up photos, not altering their content. You can’t cut out an ex-girlfriend and replace her with your current one, and there aren’t options for cool special effects or filters like there are in Photoshop. Those things aren’t included in the software, because they’re not tools a serious photographer usually needs (unless they work for TMZ or the National Enquirer!)
This software will do anything you’d be able to do in a darkroom, and then some. In addition to the regular contrast, hue, saturation, etc, there are options to adjust exposure, white balance, color temperature, clarity, vibrancy, and much more. There are also several levels of fine-tuning that you can do with most of them. In addition, there are 18 different presents for popular looks, including Aged Photo, Low and High-Contrast BW, Sepia, and Direct Positive. You can also create your own User Presets for future use.
There are many ways to export your finished photos. You can put them together in a slideshow, complete with text and music. There are also professional-looking templates that you can use to create a website to feature your work. As a photographer though, I loved the print options. There are preset templates that you can use to print out contact sheets, triptych layouts, and mixed-sized packages (e.g. one 5x7 and six 2.5x3.5), to name a few. Of course, there are fully customizable layouts you can tinker around with, as well.
Several new features are included in this updated version of LR. My personal favorite was the localized adjustment tool. Much like the dodge/burn feature in Photoshop, this tool allows the editor to adjust the contrast, saturation, color, clarity, and much more over very specific areas of a photo. Another new (somewhat related) feature is the Graduated Adjustment tool, which allows you to tweak similar variables over a wide area of the photo. (See photos for example.) Another great addition is the ability for multiple monitor interfacing, so that if you have multiple monitors available, this really allow you to spread your work out or work on multiple tasks at once.
There are, however, two export options that I expected to see, but were surprisingly absent. First, you cannot burn photos or slideshows directly to a DVD or CD; it must be sent to a separate file before burning. (This is especially odd because both Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements, Adobe’s consumer grade software packages, have this functionality already built in.) Second, there is no option to put together a photo package of different pictures. If I want one 4x6 of a rainbow and four 2x3s of some flowers, I can’t put them on the same sheet. All of the photos on a sheet have to be of the same picture (unless it’s a contact sheet, in which case you can make them all different). This unexpected limitation is both surprising and disappointing, especially with the vast array of options offered in everything else.
