Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 Upgrade

If you are a digital photographer, you shoot in raw, and you don't have Aperture, this is the software for you. Since I started using Lightroom, I rarely use Photoshop. Lightroom will save you time in processing raw images and you won't have to go through the Photoshop learning curve. Legend is that this is the product that the original authors of Photoshop developed especially for digital photographers.

I have a registered, working version on LR1 on my XP system, and went to install this product (LR2). Unfortunately, I don't have my LR1 keycode - I usually write the keys when I first open the box (both on the cd and a master list of my keycodes that I keep in a cd case with the written-on cd) but I have accumulated a ton of them and misplaced LR1. It's probably around and I'll be able to fully register once it turns up, but bear in mind when you buy this that you'll need your original LR1 keycode to enter along with the one they send with LR2. One nice feature is that you can use it with full features for 30 days while you look for it! Other than the problem that I can't locate my key, it's a great program - powerful, easy to use functions for basic picture tweaking. One complaint: the file management system is a somewhat proprietary with "Libraries" instead of folders and keeps all your changes to the original "Nondestructively" (so you can undo without losing quality.) In both versions, I've found that outputting the finished product is the least intuitive part of the process, and not unlike misplacing my keycode, I've gotten confused as to how my changes were saved (or in my case, lost forever) when I had to re-install. (RTM:)

The upgrade to Lightroom 2 has made Lightroom 1 much more user friendly. It is well worth the price. Shipment was prompt and it arrived according to schedule.

Lightroom 2 is a great upgrade from Lightroom 1. With many of the new features it has, you will find that your trips into Photoshop will become less & less frequent.

The print module is now excellent, with it's new improved output sharpening feature.

It is well worth the price of the upgrade.

The equipment I use is a Professional SLR with several prime lenses. I shoot citiscapes,landscapes,wildlife. So I don't need complex laying tools to interchange faces and bodies as are provided in full photshop CS4. The spotting/redeye/cropping/hue/saturation/tone curve/brush/graduated filter tools in LR2 are more than enough. In LR2 these are presented as easy to use sliders on the same screen with your raw camera image, so you can quickly make any adjustments and get on with showing them. All adjustments are stored as 'orders to do later' with your raw image, and they are not applied until you export from LR to print, DVD, HDTV. They remain in the LR2 library as well and you can go back anytime, reset a former adjustment, and do it over differently, change to black and white or whatever. No pixels are ever lost.

LR2 is logical, easy, lossless, and fairly cheap. If you need more exotic tools, add CS4, as LR2 provides for moving images into CS4 for additional work while keeping the original raw image in the LR2 library unchanged. The LR2 book by Martin Evening is so far the best book I've found for how to use the software.