Steve Weinrebe's Mode Studio

Adobe has officially released Lightroom 2 after a lengthy public beta period. Hosting the same elegant interface as Lightroom 1, but with many new features and a 64 bit version for both Mac and Windows users (allowing increased RAM usage to seriously speed up the app), Lightroom 2 is available now from Adobe. The program serves many photographers’ purposes at a much lower price point than Photoshop CS3, and is a one stop solution for wedding and portrait photographers who want to apply tonal and color corrections to images, label and sort, create a web site and print, all from one user-friendly interface.

Among the new features in Lightroom 2 are a revised, and more intuitive, Library module; and (hold onto your seats!) localized color and tonal corrections.This, to me, is the real differentiator, the killer feature that will compel Lightroom 1 users to adopt the upgrade. Previously only Adobe’s senior application, Photoshop CS3, had the ability to alter only portions of an image (local corrections, vs. “global” corrections which affect an entire image). Personally I am still a huge fan of Photoshop CS3′s masking abilities and so that is where I turn for correcting images, but if you are a committed Lightroom user this is a terrific feature worthy of upgrading. Other features bring to Lightroom some parity with Bridge CS3, including the ability to select multiple images to edit in Photoshop, including for panoramas. Congratulations to Thomas Knoll and the Lightroom development team for putting out such a great upgrade to the Photoshop family.

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