Why I love Lightroom

I have a confession to make. I am by no means a professional photographer. A professional would take lots of time to compose a shot, measure lighting, adjust color balance, set manual controls on the camera, etc. I belong to the new generation of photographers who rely heavily on digital technology to make them seem better at photography than they are.

Now don't get me wrong, there is still some skill involved in getting good shots, but it is not the hardcore-anal-retentive-pay-attention-to-every-setting-take-only-one-shot attitude of a "professional" photographer. I tend to just click-click-click away at the shutter, tweak a setting here and there, check the histogram every once in a while, and hope I get something good enough to be able to tweak it to be perfect (or nearly perfect) in the post-processing.

That is where Lightroom comes in. Lightroom (technically "Adobe Photoshop Lightroom") is an image organization and editing program that is sort of a highly specialized version of Photoshop. It does not do everything that Photoshop does, and yet it does so much more. One of the things I love most about it is that it is super easy to edit a whole batch of photos, and the edits take no time at all to do, and take almost no extra space on the hard drive, even if you are editing RAW files. Normally with Photoshop you would have to open the RAW file, apply the initial RAW processing to it, render it into Photoshop file, add any special Photoshop edits to it, and then save it as a whole new file on the hard drive that probably takes up five times the space as the orignal RAW file. Lightroom lets you work directly with the RAW files, and all edits can easily be modified later, without the need to save a huge edited file on the side.

It is also very easy to crop and rotate the pictures at any time (unlike Photoshop where once it is cropped it is cropped permanently), and adjust color balance, and so much more.

Anyway, enough with the boring details, here are some before and after examples that were edited in Lightroom in only a couple of minutes. These are from my sister's wedding on Tuesday (congrats Meg). I will probably post some more wedding photos later.

Before

After

Before

After

I think it is obvious why I love Lightroom so much. Lighroom 3 just came out this month, so Christy decided that for father's day I could get the upgrade. I don't have it yet, so I haven't tried it yet, but I am excited to see what is new. I will let you know what I think.