Adobe Lightroom Beta: First Impressions Count For A Lot

We’ve been using iPhoto to collect and organize all our photos. Back when we just had a bunch of snapshots, it worked fabulously; now that we’re routinely wrangling not just hundreds but thousands of images, iPhoto isn’t quite hacking it. To be fair, no one ever said iPhoto was the right tool for the professional photographer, but since we didn’t want to shell out the bucks for Aperture, we were sort of stuck with it.

Then, two things happened: we figured out how to disable iPhoto as the default downloader when the camera is connected, and we snagged a copy of Adobe Lightroom Beta.

First things first: turning off automatic importing in iPhoto. When we first set up the computer, we didn’t think twice about using iPhoto as our image-uploading default. Once we got the DSLR and started shooting RAW, we regretted that decision. Sure, it can handle RAW files. Sort of. But since you have to open the RAW files in Photoshop anyway if you want to take advantage of all the format has to offer, iPhoto is not the ideal place for them. Also, once an iPhoto album gets a few hundred images in it, it takes an unreasonable amount of time to load. We like instant gratification. Waiting for iPhoto to get fired up was driving us up the wall.

Turns out it’s the easiest thing in the world to disable this feature once you know what you’re doing. Just open Image Capture (in your Applications folder), choose Image Capture > Preferences and choose another default application. We chose Image Capture itself; it’s quick and snappy, and it has a preset for transferring images to the Pictures folder so we didn’t even have to set anything up. Sweet!

Next, we fired up Lightroom. The dark gray interface coupled with a truly dazzling array of sidebar widgets was a bit daunting at first, but we quickly realized that the options were similar to those in the Camera Raw import screen in Photoshop CS2 – just beefed up and arranged more intuitively. The Library screen, for example, has a “Quick Develop” section at the top right: you can make basic changes to your images right there using common settings such as white balance, exposure and cropping.

You can also continue to the Develop screen, which features all the robust image correction options in Photoshop (Curves, Color Adjustment, Lens Correction, Camera Calibration, and more). This screen also has a clever new feature: at left is a menu of presets which you can mouseover to preview on a thumbnail of your selected image. A similar feature is available for the image’s history. Want to see what that picture would have looked like without the color correction? Just mouseover that entry in the history and get an instant preview. Instant! We love it when we don’t have to wait.

After tweaking your photographs to your heart’s delight, you’ve got several options: create a slideshow, print your images, or publish them to the web. I went straight for the Web screen; we’ve been consistently disappointed with Photoshop’s web publishing features, so we wanted to see what Lightroom had to offer. This is what we came up with: click to see test album.

Everything from the background colors to the company name (you can type your name in or use your own logo) can be customized to blend seamlessly with your site, and publishing an album is quick, simple and painless. As it should be. We particularly like the ability to create a Flash album; it’s ideal for putting together a collection of images from a shoot to show to a client without worrying about resizing images for copyright purposes.

Verdict: Adobe Lightroom Beta kicks ass. Which is too bad, because now we know we’ll have to buy it when it goes out of Beta…

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