Lightroom
Review by Keith Johnson(www.KeithJohnson.net)

Lightroom is great for professional digital photographers and Photoshop enthusiast, but if you’re a hobbyist you may want to go a simpler and less expensive route.

If you shoot in RAW the program can be a lot of fun and produce some very impressive work. RAW is “unprocessed” images before the camera processes the image. Lightroom allows you to do the processing and that is a huge benefit and give you complete control over your finial image output. RAW allows color adjustment, white balance and better image sharpening.

I have been doing freelance web design for many years and the web templates that come with Lightroom are very professional if you do not know anything about web design and development. Also like many Adobe web products it comes with nice ftp software. It does a good job making nice web pages, but you still have to create your website, it isn’t an html editor.

The program has a slick interface with 5 tabs; Library, Develop, Slideshow, Print and Web. You import your images in Library mode, fine tune (play) with your images in Develop and use Slideshow or Print for you output and finally Web to load them up to your website. It does it all and it does it remarkably well.

The biggest draw back to this program is that is doesn’t come with a book, it is more a brochure. It you decide to purchase the product it would be a good idea to pick up a 3rd party book at the same time. Also you want to make sure you camera shoots in Raw, don’t assume that you have a new camera and it does.

So is the program a buy, a definite yes if you shoot in RAW format, but if you don’t you may not get your value from this program.