Adobe Photoshop Lightroom v1.0 - First Impressions
Version 1 of Lightroom has arrived - now officially called Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. I have decided to give it a try with the view to using Lightroom instead of Aperture.
What has improved
over Lightroom beta 4.1?
Well quite a lot. I will concentrate this time on the
Library module as there are far to many changes and
improvements for this one post.
- In the Library module there is now a Metadata
browsing mode which allows you to see your collection
automatically sorted by date, camera, lens, file type or
location.
- A new Folder view reflects the folder or directory
structure on you hard disk. As you move folders or files
around outside of Lightroom changes will be automatically
reflected in the Lightroom folder structure; even if
Lightroom is not running at the time.
- The Find functionality has changed and sports a date
finder (slider). Gone though is the ability to show or
hide subfolder contents. I found the old way very useful
as I could check to see if all my photos had been
allocated a sub folder.
- Keyword handling has been extensively enhanced in the
library module for keyword searching and assignment.
There are now displays of recent keywords and implied
keywords
Will I switch from Aperture?
I still find the Lightroom interface somewhat cramped. The text size is quite large and even on an 1600 x 1024 monitor I find there is not enough room to get a good view of you folder structure. Aperture has the edge in that it can span multiple monitors and gives you a much better folder view of your image library.
I had hoped that Lightroom would provide better image management functionality as I still find Lightrooms' Develop and Print modules are better than Aperture.
So the bottom line is that I will continue to use both programs.
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