Product Reviews

To counter the flurry of activity surrounding Aperture, Apple's high-end photography application, Adobe has taken the unprecedented step of releasing a public beta of its own photography tool, Lightroom.

Unlike Bridge, the image and file browser that unites the CS2 suite, Lightroom is a relational database that performs non-destructive edits on images, bringing sophisticated processing tools to all images - Jpegs and Tiffs, as well as Camera Raw files. Lightroom operates a 'room' interface familiar from some 3D applications, combining elegance of appearance with an intuitive and powerful set of editing tools.

Photographs are imported direct from cameras in the Library room, with full control over naming and categorisation. Here they can be sorted, ranked and arranged, using both scalable thumbnails within the main editing window and a filmstrip view across the bottom of the screen. Many of the standard Photoshop shortcuts can be used: press Tab to hide the interface elements, the F key to hide the menubar, and so on.

Many more shortcuts enable speedy operation, such as pressing L to dim all except the main image, and L again to black out everything else; pressing B while scrolling through images will store them to the Quick Collection folder for printing or slideshow operations; pressing Shift and Tab will hide everything except the currently selected images, at the same time enlarging them to fill the monitor.

Click once within an image to zoom to actual size; click and hold to zoom temporarily, zooming out again when the mouse button is released. Multiple images can be compared by command-clicking on their thumbnails, and the images are automatically resized to fit the space.

The Library view gives access to the Quick Develop tools, which allow you to adjust the white balance, exposure, brightness, contrast and saturation settings - either by dragging sliders or by choosing one of the preset examples. You can copy settings here, and apply them to any selected images; alternatively, a selection of images can be synchronised, so that adjusting one will automatically apply the same adjustments to all the rest.

For more control, switch to the Develop room,

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which offers a huge set of processing controls. These include white balance, exposure and contrast settings, individual highlight, midtone and shadow adjustments for both luminance and compression, split toning to adjust the hue and saturation of highlights and shadows independently, and a comprehensive HSL colour tuning for independent editing of hue, saturation and luminance for each colour, as well as lens correction, sharpening and noise reduction, and custom greyscale creation. It's a far wider range of processing tools than you'll find in Photoshop, or any other image editing application; and because all the edits are non-destructive, the original file remains untouched so you can always return to it later. Selecting a previously-adjusted image will load up all the tuning controls as you last left them, so they can be tweaked at will.

Unlike Aperture, Lightroom has no hefty processor requirements: adjustments are carried out as you drag the sliders on low res versions of the images, which switch back to high res as soon as your Mac can process the data (usually less than a second).

The Slideshow room works with selected images, entire collections or Quick collections, offering intuitive tools for setting the background colour, drop shadow, image size and position, slide duration and EXIF details. You can even add your own text to all the slides, sized and positioned where you wish. Slideshows can be exported to HTML, PDF and Flash files, with more formats promised in the future.

Of particular interest is the Print room, which makes light of printing both individual images and contact sheets. As well as choosing from a range of templates, you can set the margins and table cells by simply dragging within the large preview window; images can be set to automatically scale, zoom, crop and rotate to make best use of the space. While you'd expect a lengthy processing time for printing large images, contact sheets can be printed using Draft mode, which outputs the images directly from the cached thumbnails for an accurate representation of the finished photographs. Printing is faster, easier and slicker than anything Photoshop can offer.

Although Lightroom is still in beta, it's showing itself to be a powerful, intuitive, elegant and hugely valuable addition to any photographer's toolset, but will also prove its worth for montage artists who need to enhance their images as much as possible before opening copies of them in Photoshop.

With its moderate system requirements, speedy operation and slick interface, Lightroom may well prove to be the only processing tool photographers need in order to rescue, enhance and optimise their images. Aperture may have got there first, but Lightroom looks, once again, to position Adobe as the king of photo editing.