Very Useful Program for Digital Photo Pre-Use Management, July 22, 2010

Those familiar with Photoshop might wonder why an additional product should be needed to manage digital images. I would offer this difference: Photoshop is a program for image manipulation; it's for folks who want to change their photographs or create new substance in an image. Lightroom is a program that, primarily, expedites photography workflow. By You can "tweak" pics very nicely with Lightroom, but Photoshop's the paragon for substantial alteration.Lightroom 3 simplifies enormously the process of preparing photo captures for use, whether as web or print applications. It facilitates quick organization & preview, raw enhancement, printing, and web uploading of photos.The...

Lightroom 3 was an awesome addition to my studio. Prior to using lightroom I was using Bridge and PhotoShop to process all my photos. If you go out and shoot a few photos a week I would not recommend dropping the cash to get lightroom. If you shoot or want to shoot 1000 images a day and don't want to spend most of your time in front of a computer doing post work, buy lightroom 3.Performance: Lightroom 3 works amazingly well on computer running a 64bit OS like win7. After watching a few tutorial videos on the program I was able to add lightroom to my work-flow and get files edited and to my clients about twice as fast as just using BR/PS.Great for:1.Noise reduction (simple and awesome)2.Making small to medium adjustments to photos quickly3.Managing photo meta data4.cataloging and sorting5.getting images to the web6.printing packages7.slide shows8....

I'll start off by saying I thought $300 for a photo program was more than I wanted to spend. I had tried the 30 day trial when LR2 came out, but couldn't get in enough keyboard time during the 30 day trial period. I decided to try the Beta when LR3 B1 came out and actually got about 70 days under my belt before B2 expired.I had bought and used Elements 3 and 7, and while pretty good enhancers, there organizational abilities were weak. By weak, I mean, once they were catalogued and or key worded, they were fine, but the key wording was tedious.Enter LR3. It doesn't have the capability of Elements (or photoshop either, I assume) but it does have enough capability to handle 90 % of what I do. What I usually do is correct color and exposure, saturate or desatureate some colors to enhance the image or de-emphasize the back ground, sharpen things up a bit and or decrease noise, mostly luminous, and apply the lens correction feature. I have also used the curves...