Adobe Photoshop Lightroom product reviews

First impressions were "WOW! What a stunning looking workspace!" The 'dark' theme looks almost like it was designed by the same team who did the new look for Microsoft Office 2007, which is not a bad thing, but quite obviously a transitional ready for Windows Vista and it's notorious aeroglass interface.

The look and feel of the interface is quite smooth, with a LOT of features packed in there, but they are embedded in hideaway panels that can be tucked away easily, and will fly-out when you mouse-over the edge of the screen. Very nifty, all the features, but none of the space wasted. Stacking the 'Navigator' panel the way they did means that when you import large numbers of folders, some of the info palettes vanish off down the bottom of a VERY long queue... such as when you import 1700 images spread across 162 folders... Sliderbars and an anchored-sectional approach might have been tidier. A more modular style, such as that used in the new After Effects v7 might have provided a more functional, and customisable, interface.

Importing small numbers of images at a time is very simple, but importing a large number of existing images can prove troublesome, until you realise you can do it via the 'Folders' palette directly... then it's just a matter of sit back, relax, and leave it alone for an hour to do it's mojo... but be sure to leave it set to "Import from where they are" and not one of the "copy to..." options, or you end up flooding your hard-drive with clones. And while on the topic of importing, AutoImport is great for those who use removable storage frequently, such as digital camera cards. Once you have it configured, it becomes a "plug it in and wait, then unplug it and you're done" operation... all automated, including the assigning of default metadata profiles.

The 'Metadata Browser' is a great option! Search and view by date, camera, lens type, file type, location, and more... of course, that relies on your files actually HAVING all that data stored in the m/d tags... but much of that can be automated during the import process, so be sure to set up your profiles before you go mad and import a huge array of images.

As a Photoshop junkie, I was particularly interested in the on-the-fly histograms that pop up in the right-side panel. It gives a knowing eye a far better representation of the image's colour densities, allowing for more control and much more fine-tuning of the colour content of the image, and gives a great at-a-glance representation of the colour-spread of the selected image... great for detecting any unwanted colour-casts. Fascinating to see how much of a difference a little tweak in Photoshop can affect an image's colour charts.

Having various image-related controls appear around the image itself when you mouse-over is a great concept... think mini right-click menu, without the right-click! Of course, there are more controls available if you DO right-click, as well as the option to set what data appears in the captionspace under each image, such as it's rating, or what camera took it, location, date, megapixel rating, and a host of others... basically if it's in the metadata, you can chose to display that info for each image, in the browser, much the way ACDSee or a Google Image Search does.

Overall, I would have to say this is probably the biggest tool to hit the market since Google's abortive 'Picasa' offering, which I found to be klunky and awkward to use, slow to work, and far too intrusive with it's auto-search... Adobe have pulled another amazing rabbit out of their development hats, and once more have managed to design the very tool that caters exactly to a key target market, digital image experts. With the release of CS3 now upon us, I can't wait to see what new wonders we have to behold...