PhotonJohn Blog

Adobe has released the initial Lightroom 2 public beta.

Adobe Photoshop® Lightroom® answers the digital photographer’s call for a workflow application that allows photographers to quickly work with raw format images. With Lightroom you can manage all of your photographs; showcase them in print, dynamic slideshows, and interactive Web galleries that are a simple to produce. Lightroom’s cross platform support allows photographers to effortlessly work on projects from any Windows or Macintosh computer on-location or in the office. Lightroom—spend less time at the computer, and more time behind the lens, doing what you love.

Some of the Lightroom 2.0 beta enhancements are:

Localized corrections — Enhance specific areas of an image for unsurpassed nondestructive flexibility and control reminiscent of the traditional darkroom dodge and burn experience.

Improved organizational tools — Find the images you need quickly and easily.

Multiple monitor support — Add an additional monitor to efficiently manage photographic workflow and presentation.

Flexible print package functionality — Create custom layouts containing multiple sizes of a photograph on a single page.

64-bit support — Lightroom 2.0 now takes advantage of the latest hardware architectures with improved memory handling and performance.

Several sites have detailed Lightroom 2.0 information.
Here are links to some of the postings. Be sure to follow links on some of these postings for access to Lightroom 2.0 beta videos.

Fortunately, the Lightroom 2 beta installation gets along well with Lightroom 1.3 installations.

…John

The Adobe white paper Non-Destructive Imaging: An Evolution of Rendering Technology is an interesting read.

With the rapid adoption of raw photography in commercial as well as amateur circles, the basic concepts of non-destructive imaging are increasingly important. But non-destructive workflows are not new. In this paper Peter Krogh leads you through a detailed outline of these evolving rendering technologies, and describes their relevance to every digital photographer.

SO WHAT IS DESTRUCTIVE IMAGING?

You might be tempted to ask, why destroy your photos? Aren’t you supposed to make them better? The word destructive is not referring to destruction of the photo’s goodness, but rather destruction of the original data in the image.

So while you may make a photo “better” by lightening up shadow detail, you may do it in a way that destroys the original information. This paper concentrates on ways to adjust photos without losing the original information.

The author makes a good case for using catalog-based Parametric Image Editing (PIE) software such as Adobe Lightroom. It enables generating an unlimited number of renderings of a photo. Rendering changes are stored in a catalog, applied to the previews, but not necessarily touching the original file.

Catalog-based PIE software that is integrated with a rendering engine can create these derivative products even more efficiently than non-rendering cataloging software. It’s frequently desirable to do a bit of touch-up to the image files on the way to output. Having that ability within the same program that groups and sends files to output lets the user integrate picture selection and image editing in a streamlined way.

I relied on iView MediaPro cataloging program (now Microsoft® Expression® Media) before Adobe lightroom was available. It has limited if any PIE capabilities.

…John