Bovine Building [Canon 5D]
Santa Cruz, California - August 10, 2007
(click in the image for a larger version)
The big news in the digital photosphere yesterday and today is that Adobe has officially announced the shipping version of Photoshop Lightroom 2.0. It first became available as a public beta back in early April and now, four months later, you can purchase and download it from the Adobe web site (click the link above to go to that page). The price is $299 for first time buyers and $99 to upgrade from version 1.
This version offers some really cool new functionality a well as subtle improvements and tweaks that current Lightroom users will really appreciate. Here's a quick rundown of some of the biggest new features:
- Adjustment Brush - This is undoubtedly the flashiest new feature and soon will become something that you just can't live without. It allows you to brush on non-destructive corrections so that only specific areas of the photo are affected. But it goes beyond simple lightening and darkening (i.e., "dodging and burning"); you can brush on localized changes to Brightness, Exposure, Clarity, Saturation and Color Tint. Changes made with this new tool can always be adjusted after the fact in a variety of ways.
- Graduated Filter - This enables you to create a non-destructive effect that is very similar to the effect you could create by using a graduated neutral density filter on the camera lens. Great for darkening just the sky in a landscape photo, for instance.
- Better Integration with Photoshop - Several features have been added that allow Lightroom to "play better" with Photoshop. These include key functionality that Lightroom users have been hoping for such as the ability to open an image in Photoshop as a Smart Object; Merge to Panorama in Photoshop; Merge to HDR in Photoshop; and opening several images as separate layers in a single Photoshop document.
- Smart Collections - these are special collections that will automatically update themselves based on a specified set of search criteria. For example, say you create a Smart Collection called "Best Portraits", and you specify that it will only contain images that are tagged with the keyword "portrait" and have a rating of at least 3 stars. Anytime you add new images to your Lightroom library that have those two attributes, they will automatically be added to the "Best Portraits" Smart Collection. Very nice!
- Multiple Monitor Support - If you have dual monitors, you can finally take advantage of all that extra screen real estate and expand your Lightroom workspace.
- Filter Bar - This is a vastly improved Find feature that helps you locate images based on a wide variety of criteria, including keywords, camera metadata, capture time, ratings, labels, etc.
In addition to these major goodies, the new version also offers a host of other improvements and enhancements such as a volume browser that shows you the external drives connected to your system, where the photos are located and how much space is left on the drives; suggested keywords; picture packages; smart print sharpening; preparing print files for outlab services; title slides in slide shows; and 16-bit printing in Mac OS 10.5 (applicable, of course, only if you have a printer capable of 16-bit printing).
All in all, this is a really solid upgrade and it's great to finally see it out of beta and have the final version to play with.
The good folks over at the National Association of Photoshop Professionals (NAPP) have posted a Lightroom 2 Learning Center, and Colin Smith has also posted a Lightroom 2 section over at the PhotoshopCAFE.
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Did You Recently Purchase Lightroom 1.0?
If you purchased Lightroom 1 within 30 days of the shipping version announcement (July 29th), you should be eligible for a free "post-announce upgrade".
To get the free upgrade, call the Adobe Sales number: 800-585-0774 and once you are connected to a sales rep, tell them you need to get a post-announce upgrade. The "official" timeline for this deal is that you purchased the previous version 30 days prior to the announcement of the shipping version. In double-checking this policy for some students in one of my upcoming workshops, the rep that I spoke to told me that if it was within a week or two of the 30 days they would probably let it through.
But I would act on this soon if you want the free upgrade.
One more thing: if you did not purchase it through Adobe, then you will need to have your receipt handy as there is some information that they will need in order to process the order.
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Upcoming Workshops
I have two digital photography workshops coming up in August at the Maine Media Workshops, and in the Fall I have a total of four workshops taking place in northern and central California. Check out the current Workshop Schedule at my main web site.
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