Lightroom

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is a software programme for photographers, whether they are professional or amateurs. It was developed by Adobe Systems in 2004, with the Version 1 for Windows and Mac OS X first appearing on the market in 2006.

The latest release of Adobe's photo processing application, Photoshop Lightroom 4, delivers a host of improvements while introducing a number of snazzy new features as well. With this release Lightroom users can create and layout a book of their photographs right in the application.

Some time ago, we discussed a bunch of simple tips you can use to make your photos stand out from the crowd. Last time, we worked on a landscape however this time it should be interesting to work on a portrait, and prove the power of Lightroom with just a few clicks.

The new version of great photo organizer and editor Adobe Lightroom 3 still lacks geotagging support. It should be able to work with images already containing GPS information, but you do not have any chance how to set them. But there is one third party and free solution at least: special plugin for Lightroom 3 with geotagging features.

Black and white photography always had a certain je ne sais quoi, it speaks differently to the viewer – the lack of colors is compensated by the depth of the subject and by the way shadows and light build the entire image. In other words, if color photography is easily valued through its… colors, with black and white images it is a lot harder to send out the right message – one has to be a lot careful with composition, subject positioning, lightning and so on.

With all the crazy apps nowadays, enhancing your photos seems like the easiest thing ever – I mean, if even typical applications such as Picasa can help you bring out the color in your eyes and cheeks and make your vacation photographs sparkle, why do we need to complicate our lives with complicated editing software? This particular question was asked around Adobe Labs as well, and their answer to this problem was – Adobe Lightroom. It’s obviously a lot easier to use than Adobe Photoshop (if you’ve tried it, you know exactly what I mean), not to mention that it is designed to do exactly what a non-commissioned photographer needs – enhance their photos using some rather cool tricks.

Post-processing has reached a new era ever since people have learned to shoot their pictures in RAW. Before I wrote this article I took some time to think whether it would be a good idea to show you the miracles of RAW or whether it would be more interested to show the good Lightroom can do to a mere JPG image. Even if this particular article will not be a step-by-step tutorial I will make sure no part (of the article) of it is left unexplained. I used the new version of Adobe Lightroom, more precisely Adobe Lightroom 2.3