Playing with Lightroom

For a long while now, I've been using Adobe Bridge and Adobe Photoshop as my photo management and photo editing system respectively. Bridge isn't perfect, but it has a very short learning curve and it has a superb KISS approach. I've been using Photoshop since version 3; I'm by no means an advanced user, but I'm very comfortable with how I use it.

Spending way to much time on the Internet however, I've learned that many photographers use Adobe Photoshop Lightroom for managing and editing their photos instead. After playing around with it for about 2 days, I now understand why Lightroom (along with Apple's Aperture) is THE application for the photographer. It basically allows you to do 99% of what you need with a photo: manage, edit, beautify, crop, add filters, fix errors, reduce noise. All of them can be done in Lightroom.

This photo was part of my walkaround set from Singapore in September. I couldn't edit it properly in Photoshop then so I never did post process it.

With Lightroom, I cropped, converted to black & white with a preset, adjusted contrast and luminescence, added a vignette and even added a watermark. And it took less than 10 minutes to do it.

It won't be printable considering how much I cropped it, but it looks decent for the web :). And with that, I'm sold on Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.