The booming sales of high-end SLR cameras has pushed Adobe into incorporating new features and tools into its new Photoshop Lightroom version 2.0.  SLR cameras are helping usher in many of digital photography’s biggest changes, and Adobe is trying to intercept that trend with Lightroom.  The company also hopes customers will be drawn by a number of new features in the software for sorting, cataloging, and editing photos, which has been a hot topic among Photoshop users.

One significant feature common to SLRs is the ability to shoot "raw" photos, which means the images are taken directly from the image sensors without the camera baking in its own assumptions about what’s right.  Raw images offer more editing flexibility than JPEG, so it’s better for aficionados who need to correct underexposure or an orange color casts.  The thing is- raw images require processing into more standard, universal formats for sharing–thus software such as Lightroom, Apple’s Aperture, Phase One’s Capture One, and others have been created.

"Prices are coming down, so more people with entry-level SLRs are experimenting," said Tom Hogarty, the Adobe senior product manager in charge of Lightroom. "If you pick up the camera for the sake of creating an artistic thing and not just recording a family event, you’ve really taken the plunge into serious photography. Anyone at that level is an ideal Lightroom customer."

According to CNet, Lightroom 2.0 has a revamped interface and several new features, most notably a much broader ability to edit selected portions of an image.  It’s also got a surprise that wasn’t in the beta version: exposure gradients that can help with the classic photography problem of showing both a dark foreground and a brilliant sunset.

Lightroom occupies a new niche in Adobe software’s history. Its interface, built from scratch, hints at things to come to the broader world of Photoshop and photo editing overall.  Unlike Adobe’s earlier products, it’s designed for the new crop of photos challenges, like when people come back from a vacation or a photo shoot with hundreds of images.  Many folks are happy just copying their pictures off their cameras, but for enthusiasts, there are other challenges. Besides editing photos, they must weed out the duds, edit and organize the keepers, label them with where they were taken and who’s in them, and print or upload them to photo-sharing sites. With no negatives anymore, they might want to leave the original digital files intact.

For extreme Photoshop users, they’ll welcome the upgrades.  For the average user, however, most of these advanced functions are completely useless.  These high-end features come with a high-end price as well.  Is it worth it?

Related:

Entry was posted on Tuesday, July 29th, 2008 at 10:42 pm under Digital SLR, New Products, Photo editing software.

Read more entries by Justin Montgomery.