The more I’ve been learning about Lightroom 2 (technically now at 2.3), the more I’ve been liking it!  First of all, I learned that - thanks to new camera profiles (also available in the latest camera raw software) - I can get my photos to start from where Canon’s own RAW software would have started.  I never realized it was a better choice than photoshop because I liked the photoshop workflow so much.  But now that I’ve played with the camera profiles in Lightroom, I realize that I’ve been selling my images short.

I just wanted to really elaborate on why I think Adobe Lightroom is a program any enthusiast to pro user should own.  Although, as I related here, LR has grown on me, going through the photos I shot at my cousin’s wedding has really cemented my love for Adobe’s product.  Here are my two favorite features.  You may want to open up the images in a new tab at full size so you can follow along.

So I did a test and found that as long as I save the metadata to the file, Adobe Bridge (even with CS2) can correctly read the changes.  So I decided to work in Lightroom to see if it was worth buying.  I can say that I am really loving it!  I’ve been able to adopt my usual RAW workflow with only some small changes.  Now I can’t see how I could ever work without LR!!  (It’s no wonder why Adobe gives a 30 day free trial!)

For quite some time I’ve been been struggling with the point of Adobe’s Lightroom.  Other than competing with Apple’s Aperture, it appears not to have a purpose.  Of course, right around the time Lightroom (LR) was hitting its stride, I stopped reading photography magazines.  The zine I loved the most was a British one published by the same company that puts out Linux Format Magazine.  Unfortunately, even with an exchange rate of $1:1 Britsh Pound (which isn’t the case), it’s still $90 per year.  So I may have missed lots of tutorial and explainer articles talking about why LR is such a great program.  My impression of it was of a Adobe Bridge and Camera Raw.  So I didn’t really see the point of paying $200 for that when those programs work just fine for me.  It also seemed to straddle some Photoshop territory and I just couldn’t figure it out.