Update: Since writing my original overview of Lightroom, I have upgraded to version 4.  Version 4 is much the same as version 3 so the original writeup still stands, however it brings a few new features to the table, some that I’ll probably never use like video file support and additional output formats, others I may some day dabble with such as additional localised adjustment brushes. However one pair of tools that are not so much new as revisions of existing tools, are ones I will get a lot of use out of and in all honesty are the main reason I decided to upgrade, those being the replacement of the fill light and recovery tools with new highlight and shadow tools. These do much the same job as the old tools, recovering details in highlights and brightening shadows, however the processes driving these tools have been dramatically improved to the point where in some scenarios it’s possible to virtually re-create an exposure blending effect from a single photo using just a couple of sliders! To illustrate this I’ve added an example below

On top of the new features, probably the biggest draw of Lightroom 4 in my eyes is that Adobe seem to have slashed the RRP from around the £200 mark to around £100! Quite why they’ve suddenly done this I don’t know, and while I don’t deny mild frustration knowing that I spent out at the old pricing scheme, but this new pricing can only be a good thing! In my opinion Lightroom is more geared towards enthusiasts/hobbyists like myself and is probably more heavily used by that demographic, so this makes sense to me, and while £100 is still not exactly pocket money, it still positions it as a much more justifiable expense for non-pros than it was before

Lightroom is my one stop shop for probably 99% of my photographic workflow (unless you count updating my website with uploaded  content, but I consider that a seperate stage), this write up is based on what is at time of writing the latest version, version 3.4. It’s a bit of software that seems to split opinions, some like me love it, others hate it, there seems to be little middle ground. In short, the reason I love lightroom is because it does everything I need in one package, and while admittedly not entirely intuative to a complete beginner, once you get your head around it’s structure, it’s incredibly efficient for churning through large batches of photos cropping and making global adjustments (e.g. adjusting the exposure of the whole shot, not retouching a specific part). One big difference between lightroom and a lot of other bits of photography software is that it utilises non-destructive editting, i.e. when you use it to edit a photo, the original photo never gets over-written, instead Lightroom keeps a catalogue of every change made to every photo so they are represented in the program, and you then export the adjusted photo as a new file if and when desired. Personally I love this as it means I never have to worry about manually creating copies of photos I’m going to work on. The one thing it does mean though is that it is imperative you back up your lightroom calogue as well as your photos, or else all the changes you’ve ever made would all be lost in the event of hard drive failure. Fortunately Lightroom stores it’s catalogue by default in the Windows ‘My Pictures’ default folder, so it is easy to find and back up

Lightroom works around several modules, easy to switch between via a list at the top. I personally only use the 2 core ones 99% of the time,

Library

The library is where you’ll import photos from your camera, add descriptions etc. to the metadata if desired, organise them as you see fit and export the finished results. The thing I love here is that as well as importing photos to your computer’s hard drive and adding them to the main Lightroom folder list, you can create as many custom collections as you like. E.g. I have a ‘British Birds’ collection that lists all my best Bird photos from across all my folders in one place, and I have ‘best of’ collections for the various workshops and trips I’ve done which are my choices of what will end up on the website. There is also a handy ‘quick collection’ option where if for example you’re making a first pass through a batch of photos to pick the best ones and then whittle down from there what will be your final collection, you can easily just click a button to select the ones you want and create an automatic set that you can then work from without the clutter of anything else in the folder that you’re not interested in at the time.

One other really handy feature introduced in the lastest version of Lightroom that sped up my workflow no end is the publishing options. I host all my photos on Flickr and pull them to the site for my galleries, and in the past I would have to export mt finished photos to new files, then manually upload them to Flikr, which could be a little annoying at times. Not any more, now I have my Flickr accout linked to Lightroom, I create a new photoset, add the photos I want, hit the Publish button and bingo, everything gets done for me without leaving Lightroom, it even uses the metadata descriptions added in Lightroom for titles and descriptions so saves another job there. Not only that, if I change my mind about the way I’ve processed a photo I’ve already uploaded, rather than having to delete, re-upload it as a new photo and manually fix any links to the old version, I just re-adjust in lightroom, it detects the modification and allows me to over-write the existing one with the modified one without breaking any links, genius!

Of course as a photo organiser the module has all the expected features like the ability to edit metadata, rate photos, searches, filter based on various exif data etc. Personally I only really use the metadata editting feature as I keep a fairly logical structure to my folders so don’t really need to search or filter much, but it’s nice to know the options are there I do ever need them

Finally a feature that I believe was first introduced in Lightroom 3 is the option to create a customised watermark for your images and choose whether or not to apply it on each export, whether that be exporting a jpeg to disk, or publishing to Flickr etc. I never used to watermark my images simply because I didn’t want to have to run all my photos through a 3rd party bit of software to do it, now that it’s included in Lightroom, every photo that goes online gets my watermark added with no hassle

Develop

this module offers a quick way of making a myriad of adjustments to the list of photos in the currently selected folder or collection. The list of adjustments is really quite impressive, it would be a very long and boring list to name them all but some key ones include basics like a cropping/alignment tool (which in my opinion is far easier to use than ones found in most image manipulation software), exposure, contrast, saturation, white balance and sharpness sliders, more in depth ones like hue and saturation of individual colour channels, and various lens correction tools such as vignetting, chromatic arrabation and distortion. There is even a lens profile option, whereby if enabled, Lightroom detects the lens used in the shot and applies a matching profile designed to correct for known optical quirks for that model such as lens distortion, a big time saver if you use a lens which has noticable distortion etc. Obviously this feature is limited by whether a profile exists for the lens used, but as the feature has been inplemented since the first release of Lightroom 3.0, the list of profiles has increased with each update and now covers most lenses from the major manufacturers such as Nikon, Canon and Sigma.

Now as mentioned in the update above, Lightroom 4 introduces a change to the develop tools, the old recovery and fill light sliders are now shadow and highlight sliders (although you do have to update photos in your catalog to use the new 2012 processing engine over the previous 2010 engine, this is dead easy to do) which are more powerful than ever before and as previously mentioned, allow you to practically re-create an exposure blend effect with one shot! The easiest way to show this is with an example, below you see a photo I took of a sunset overooking Corfe Castle. On the left is shot number one out of seven bracketed shots, the neutral exposure one. I used a 0.9 grad filter and spot metering focussed on the castle, to give me the best middle ground exposure balance possible. On the right is an exposure blend I created from those 7 shots

As you can see, in the original shot the area of sky around the position of the sun is blown out and there is a lot of shadow in the foreground and midground, the exposure blend has brought out the detail almost throughout the shot, albeit some shadows remain around the trees to the left of the shot. Now below is the original photo processed as a single image, on the left is the result using the Lightroom 3 recovery and fill light tools, on the right, Lightroom 4 highlight and shadow tools. I also added a marginal white balance warming and slight contrast boost in both cases to more closely match the effect of the exposure blend for comparison, but bear in mind it took me probably less than a minute to process each of these versions and I used just 4 sliders both times

Here you can see that in Lightroom 3, that while the recovery tool has done a decent job of recovering the detail in the sky, even at max setting it’s still a bit blown out around the sun and the rest of the sky is still fairly pale, while the shadows are still pretty dark around the trees on the left as increasing the fill light any further started to blow out the foreground and generally make the photo look pretty unattractive. In Lightroom 4 however, the sky is detailed and well balanced, and the shadows are nearly completely restored, really quite impressive. Now obviously these tools aren’t capable of recovering just anything, if you have a shot where the highlights are comletely blown (i.e. off the histogram) then you can’t do anything with that. In my experience areas of shadow tend to have more detail available to be recovered than highlights (plus you can generally get away with a few dark shadows whereas blown highlights almost never look right) and the shot I used as my example had more shadows than highlights, but provided you balance the exposure as best you can in the first place it’s really quite surprising what you can achieve in under a minute with just 4 sliders, to the point it’s arguable that the Lightroom 4 processed image is possibly a better end result than my original exposure blend!

In addition to all the global adjustment sliders, newer versions of Lightroom include a few options for local adjustments, there is a basic clone tool to remove unsightly dust spots etc., and a feature that allows you to make things like exposure, contrast, saturation adjustments on select areas of a shot. Now obviously these tools are a far cry from the manipulation tools available in Photoshop and Elements, they are only very basic, but they can be very handy for quick and simple touch ups like removing minor dust spots, lightening a small under-exposed area in a shot etc. There is also a graduated filter option that allows larger scale adjustments,  if for example you wanted to re-create the effect of a physical graduated ND filter in a shot where the exposure is unbalanced, or use it for contrast, saturation etc., it’s no substitute for using a filter when taking the shot, as if something is truly over or under exposed it can’t be salvaged, but it’s a nice option if you have a shot that simply needs exposure or contrast balancing a little, I’ve used the tool to good effect a few times.

Another new feature introduced in Lightroom 3 is noise reduction. There are numerous well documented and widely used dedicated noise reduction packages out there, but by all accounts Lightroom’s inbuilt one it extremely competative in it’s effectiveness. I rarely use noise reduction so cna’t compare personally, but it’s nice to know there’s an option there without having to involve another 3rd party bit of software.

Another thing I like about Lightroom, is a result of the previously mentioned non-destructive editting it uses. Because it keeps a track of changes made rather than over-writing a file as it goes along, you can at any time in the develop module roll back to any previous point in your changes, which is great if you realise you would like to do something differently and roll back the adjustments you’ve made in the last 5 minutes but not those prior, you’re not at the mercy of the undo button and how many changes it has or hasn’t cached. I find another great advantage of this is that if I’ve finished adjusting an image but want to make a different crop of it for a specific purpose I can do that, export the new crop, then just roll back to the point prior to re-cropping so I’m straight back where I wanted the photo for general use.

The Rest

The other modules of lightroom I’ve never really used barring a quick look out of curiosity, they are Slideshow, Printing and Web, plus new to version 4 Map and Book. These allow you to create slideshows, print, create flash or HTML web galleries, geotag photos and generate photobook templates respectively. Slideshow I’ve never bothered with, it’s limited in that it only plays within lightroom unless I’ve missed something, Printing seems functional enough, but generally if I want a print of any photos I use an online service such as Photobox, and Web, well again it’s functional enough, but I have an established website and gallery structure which is vastly more flexible, so it’s no use to me and there are plenty of better soutions out there so I don’t recommend it unless you’re just experimenting with creating a website for the first time and want something to easy to start off with. Equally the Map and Book functions are nice extras but are just not something I’ll ever make much use of, I never geotag my photos and if I wanted a photobook, again I’d use an online service like Photobox

Conclusion

As mentioned at the top of this page, I’m not someone who likes to spend countless hours manipulating images, I prefer to spend my time taking photos and getting them right in the first place, but the suite of tools available in lightroom gives me all the quick and simple adjustments I like. I can crop, adjust exposure, white balance, enhance colours individually or globally etc. in no time, on average if I’m churning through a large batch of photos I can spend less than a minute making all the adjustments I want on a each and head on to the next one, which makes processing in bulk a much less tedious experience. I’ve used it for a while now and find it very rare that I need to touch any other software, from importing from my camera all the way through to getting them online. I personally highly recommend Lightroom to anyone like me who wants an all in one workflow solution and isn’t worried about heavy maniuplation of each shot.

The only problem with Lightroom in my eyes is the same that plagues many Adobe products, the price. While it’s a far cry from the insane cost of Photoshop, and with version 4 Adobe roughly halved the cost, it’s still around £100 depending on when you buy it, which is probably a bit much for a lot of people. I didn’t buy in to Lightroom for a long time because of the price, but after trialling it for a while realised how good it was and how well it suited my workflow, so eventually decided to bite the bullet when I spotted it on reduced price. Whether or not it’s worth as much to anyone else as it is to me is always going to be subject to opinion, but with a free 30 day trial there’s no harm in giving it a look

Alternatives

Apple Aperture is the most direct competitor to Lightroom, is only available for Mac, and was around first, so arguably Lightroom is Adobe’s answer to Aperture. I’ve never user Aperture so can’t compare features personally, but I do know that while it used to be cheaper then Lightroom, at Adobe’s new pricing it’s actually about the same on average, so if price is a sticking point, then it’s not going to be any more attractive a prospect.

The one bit of software I am at least vaguely familiar with and do recommend for anyone who wants an all in one workflow solution similar to lightroom without costing a lot is Google Picasa. It uses a similar non-destructive editting method, is an all in one organiser and adjustment suite (albeit with much more limited adjustments available than Lightroom or Aperture), and most importantly of all, it’s completely free! I’ve not used it much myself, but have had a quick play on a family member’s laptop and from what I could see it was a surprisingly impressive bit of kit, and pretty intuative to use. So, if you’re on a budget, give Picasa a whirl, can’t hurt to try, just be aware that if do think at a later date you will upgrade to Lightroom (give the 30 day trial a go first), that any changes you make in Picasa won’t carry over unless you export them as new files first, so try to decide what direction you’re going to go in long term before you invest too much time in it.

One of the great things about lightroom is that it supports importing custom settings and plugins. In lightroom’s case there are dozens of extras available, from sets of development presets, to fully featured plugins, two of which  I am going to mention here as I use them myself and find them very effective

L/R Enfuse

HDR is a popular method of blending multiple exposures to create a shot capturing all the detail from a scene with too high a dynamic range to accurately catch in a single shot. I once trialled a very good bit of software called Photomatix for this, as well as the inbuilt Photoshop tool, both of which work work extremely well and can produce some great results. My biggest gripe with HDR though, is that all too often compositions created with this method just look too artificial for my liking, short of some heavy tweaking, which admittedly can sometimes result in some very cool ‘digital art’ like effects, but in my experience more often results in just very fake looking shots. In my search for an alternative, I eventually stumbled across an Enfuse plugin for Lightroom developed by Photographer’s Toolbox

Enfuse is an open source bit of code that blends differently exposed photos together using a technique of exposure blending, rather than the method employed in HDR. I’m not going to try and describe the difference, there are a couple of articles on L/R Enfuse’s product page which do a good job of this, all I can say is that in my experience, having compared results, Enfuse generates much more natural and believable compositions than HDR does.

L/R Enfuse is a very well put together plugin that bring’s this fucntionality into Lightroom in a very easy to use way. Installing is a simple case of dropping the files somewhere relevant and pointing Lightroom at them through the plugin managament menu, then dropping in you serial key to fully enable it. Worth nothing is that this plugin is donationware, you only pay as much as you think it’s worth, so really there’s no excuse for anyone not to be able to afford it if it’s something you think you’ll get use from, although I would encourage not being too tight fisted as I think it’s a great tool and worth supporting the developers!

As for using it, couldn’t be simpler, simply highlight the photos you want to blend, select the menu option to blend the photos, the Enfuse dialogue box appears with a few settings that can be changed if necessary, and hit go. Peronally I’ve never bothered changing any settings besides a couple of the output ones as the results are great on their default values. A picture says a thousand words as the saying goes and the below are composites I’ve created with Enfuse that hopefully show how effective it is, there are further examples via the articles on the plugin’s home page

 All in all, highly recommended!

L/R TreeExplorer

I have actually only needed to use this plugin once but it was such a time saver that I thought it was worth mentioning. Again developed by Photographer’s Toolbox, this tool is more of an organisationsal one, effectively just an extension of Lightroom’s inbult export feature but one which adds a function that is sorely lacking from Lightroom by default, the ability to export entire folder structures of photos in tact. Lightroom’s inbuilt feature for exporting photos to hard drive supports simultaneous exporting of photos from any number of source folders, but only to one destination folder, which became an issue for me when I found myself in a position where I needed to export thousands of RAW files in a detailed folder structure into JPEGS without losing the folder structure. L/R TreeExplorer enabled me to do this and saved me countless hours of manually exporting one folder at a time. Nothing more really needs to be said, it does exactly what it says on the tin, I just thought it was worth highlighting as it was such a time saver for me

In all honesty I don’t have a great deal to say about Photoshop Elements, as mentioned at the beginning of this page I’m not the type who enjoys spending hours manipulating images and Lightroom covers all the processing I need for probably 99% of the time so I actually rarely use Elements, just every once in a while though I find myself with a need for something with a bit more control,and Elements 10 does everything I could posibly need in that respect.

While it lacks a lot of the insanely detailed options of the full Photoshop package, to the more casual user, I doubt you’d notice. Elements includes a vast array of commonly used photo manipulation and editting tools, including spot healing, dodge and burn brushes, cloning, even a slightly cut back version of the much publicised ‘content aware fill’ tool that is merely limited in Elements to a brush tool rather than the full Photoshop version which allows quick selection of whole areas of a photo to apply it to.

As I have said, I rarely use the software, in fact at time of writing, beyond just testing the content aware brush tool to see how effective it is (the answer being, not perfect, but surprisingly good!), I’ve only really used it for creative edits of photos for Christmas cards or editting logos for websites, so I haven’t explored all it’s nuances and can’t offer a detailed analysis, however from what I’ve seen I would say that for the casual user, it had more than enough tools to cover whatever editting you’re likely to want to do

Also included with Elements from version 9 onwards is the Organiser utility. Personally I’ve never touched this as I use Lightroom for all my photo organisation, but I’ve heard good things about the Elements one in other reviews and it’s a nice addition if you’re not looking to splash out on something like Lightroom but want something to keep your photos organised

Of course the biggest recommendation for Elements is cost. At time of writing Elements 10 sells for around £50, Full blown Photoshop around £550! Now obviously that price difference isn’t for no reason, and for professionals who need ultimate control over every aspect of an image and understand how to use it, there is really no substitute, there’s a good reason Photoshop is, and had been for some time, the industry standard for photo editting. If you’re not a pro though, I really can’t see why you’d need to splash out so much on Photoshop when chances are you’ll never really get the use out of half of it’s features and Elements would serve you just fine, in my opinion that other £500 is much better spent on camera equipment or holidays to get you the photos in the first place

For a long time I used simple Flickr Slideshows on my gallery pages, they were quick and simple to create (simply insert a shortcode for the relevant gallery and bingo) and the presentation was always perfectly fine, but after seeing some dead impressive slideshows at photography presentations I realised they were really rather bland and fancied seeing if I could do something a bit more eyecatching.

There are dozens of good bits of software out there that allow you to create flashy slideshows from photos, but my most important criteria were, not too expensive seeing as I don’t make any money from this, and easy to integrate with my website. This immediately narrowed down the options as most software is desktop based which makes it a bit of a faff to integrate with a website, requiring creation of a video file and uploading that somewhere, and most of it is fairly expensive.

Enter ProShow Web, an offshoot of a desktop based bit of software that is hosted and fitted my criteria perfectly. For a start you can try it for free to see if you like it (you’re just limited to only a very short video with only a couple of transition effects per video), and they offer 2 different pricing plans if you want to sign up, $30 a year for a ‘Plus’ account or $150 a year for a ‘Premium’ account. Now obviously the premium account is a little pricey but it is really only meant for professional photographers who are using slideshows to generate business, as it’s benefits include HD videos, removal of the brief ProShow advert at the end of slideshows, allows you to add your own watermark to videos, and license to sell any slideshows you create. For me though, the Plus account was perfectly adequate, it removes the Proshow watermark (so aside from that momentary advert at the end of the slideshow has none of their branding), allows you to use as many transition effects per video as you like, allows full length videos up to 480p (more than adequate for my use!) and even allows you to download then as DVD quality video files should you so wish

It is also nice and easy to integrate with a website as once you’ve uploaded photos and designed your slideshow, it is hosted on your account with ProShow and you can simply grab an automatically created html code and paste it on your website to embed the video, ideal for what I wanted

Creating slideshows is dead simple too, once you have signed in, you simply log in to your account, upload your pictures (there’s even a lightroom upload plugin to make things even easier for lightroom users like me) or import them from a 3rd party such as Flickr or Facebook, add one of dozens of available royalty free music tracks (or upload your own), hit go and your video is created for you. There are of course other options available too, by default the software will apply random transition effects and a default transition speed, this is all totally customisable. I mostly just set the speed and let the software do what it wants to do with the transitions, but I also like to choose specific transitions for certain photos I want to highlight and let the software work around that for the rest.

It’s easy to share slideshows whether or not you’re integrating them in to a website, as well as the aforementioned embed code, you can copy your videos to youtube, use one of the links to automatically post a link to your video to Facebook or Twitter, or simply grab the link to the video hosted on your ProShow account and e-mail it to whoever you like.

As for the quality of the videos themselves, no complaint from me. The resolution is high enough not to detract from the quality of the source images, the available transition effects are flashy enough to be eyecatching without being too over the top and making it hard to follow, the available selection of royalty free music covers quite a good range of styles and should be possible for most people to find something they like if they don’t want to tempt fate with licensed music, and the embedded video file controls are clean and uncluttered.

All in all, I highly recommend ProShow Web for anyone who wants to create snazzy online slideshow videos with minimal hassle and without breaking the bank