Adobe Photoshop Lightroom

[kwirky]

man... I got a student copy of this program for $100 and I gott say I'm quite impressed. The program entirely replaces photoshop as a pipeline and it does a much better job.

The advantages I've seen so far with lightroom is all your adjustments are non-destructive. You play with sliders and such and when you like what you have it "renders" the final photo. This also provides for a better image because if manipulate your photo in many ways at at the same time it gives a higher quality image versus the sequential manipulation of photoshop. So if you adjust the brightness, colour balance, curve edit, sharpen, alter noise, correct lense abheration, it does it ALL AT ONCE so you have a MUCH nicer quality product versus doing it sequentially in photoshop.

Also the content pipeline is awesome. It took a little getting used to but now I don't even need bridge because I have ALL my tools, including organization, in one program.

And it's export settings are great. You can print directly from the program and have a lot of control, export an HTML image viewer (example here: http://www.kwirky88.com/gallery/kananaskis/index.html) or manually export your photo individually.

It has a lot of power to it and it'll be a little while before I really gain from all it's benefits but the program has me quite excited. If you take a LOT of photos either as a prosumer or a professional it's worth the $$.

You can't directly manipulate the photo like in photoshop. Think of it as a piece of software that lets you do everything you would do in a darkroom even easier than photoshop. Zero learning curve pretty much.

Student pricing is $100CAD from studica.com and it's $400CAD for a regular license from professional photography stores (Vistek.com).