Source: Luminous Landscape

I was taking my dinner while watching this backdated episode of photoshoptv. Scott was giving a 15 minutes introduction to Adobe Lightroom which was like giving me a sudden shock all of a suddent. It makes the digital workflow ( when i say digital, i mean digital photography) a breeze.

In the front end, there is the Library Compare View for us to view all the photos we take of the same subject. That happens very frequent as we (photographers) want to make sure that we get the shot to be the way we wanted - sharp, crisp, vivid. I'll never want to end up regretting after i got back home and see junk in front of my PC.

Then after u've decided on the photo of your choice, comes the Raw Converter tool. From the brief glance, I was told that we can make selective Grayscale, levels, curves and common White Balance tuning all in the same software. They make sure that your photos are on the center of the screen and they hide up all those toolbox when you don't need them. Besides you can dim those toolbox to the background for a better view of your photos.

After you've processed all your photos, you might want to create slides to present to your customers. That's something I've been struggling to do with Photoshop as there are no decent preset templates I'm satisfied with. You also have the option of creating Fine Art Mat, and Contact Sheets before you send your images to the printers.

Hey wait, there's even more. When you were showing the photo you took from a Nikon D2X, (or any other cameras which has GPS) the location where you took the photos will be recorded on the image's EXIF!!! You can click on the EXIF on your Lightroom, and BOOM! the location of your shoot will come out in Google Maps!!! *shocked*. "WOW", I shouted in my room. I was crazily laughing while I saw this. Make me think twice of getting the non-GPS Nikon D200. Hm...maybe the "rumoured" Nikon D80 might come equipped with GPS? Hm...let's just wait and see. Accoring to Phil Askey GPS on D200 is enable through NMEA 0183 with optional cable.

For now, the software only works on Mac OS X. But according to what I was told, it works faster than Aperture, and have everything Aperture lacks of.

Here are some previews from various sources:

Eric Wong [Photokaki]

Michael Reichmann [Luminous Landscape]

I was trying to download the beta version from Adobe.com where I bump into some "news" about the acquisition of Macromedia . My heart beats twice as fast. I know this wasn't news anymore, it was on the discussion table since April last year, and closed a fortnight before christmas. I never know what powerful integration might be coming out from such merges. But I do like to have a bridge between my works with flash one day (when i start learning flash). Don't really know how to write flash program, but I'm really interested in starting it if i have time off from my Final Year Project. I wished I wasn't in engineering.