Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2

Lightroom 2 is everything it is advertised to be. Adobe has made this a very powerful and useful program and have also made it easier to interact with Photoshop too.
Well worth the price.

I've had the chance now to use lightroom for about 2 months. I can't begin to tell you the difference this has made in my post-production work flow. I'd consider myself an advanced amateur/semi pro. The features in lightroom make post work easy and for the most part intuitive. All it took was some playing around to figure things out, and I'm still learning new things all the time. It's great that everything is non-destructive, keeping those files in pristine condition. The plug-ins are great and easy to install. Lightroom doesn't allow the same in depth editing as say Photoshop but, it can easily replace 80% of your PS work. Overall I think this product is great and I highly recommend it.

Lightroom is an incredibly useful and comprehensive tool for the digital photographer, and is to all extents and purposes a 5 star application, i found the move from version 1 to 2 though was not as well thought-out as is the norm in a photoshop upgrade. Several of the changes in this version, i found irritating and it has taken me sometime to migrate fully from version 1, there is not really a pressing reason to move to version 2. Loss of the middle mouse buttons functionality to move sliders when developing is still enough to make me return to Lightroom 1.
The new features are far from breathtaking, and some of the changes are outright annoying and ill thought-out, but this is still a super powerful and very impressive piece of software which will bring new life to any photographers collection.
The Graduated filter is really the only new feature of note, and personally i find the other new targeted adjustment tools of little worth, but it does potentially free up the lightroom user from having to use photoshop at all, which is no bad thing for many digital photographers.
Lightroom is at heart a super powerful tool for organizing and managing big or small collections of digital images, and allowing the photographer to creatively edit images in a completely non-destructive fashion, and although the true power can be unleashed when working with camera RAW files, its also a great tool for anyone working with libraries of jpegs.
Lightrooms printing and web capabilities are extensive, and for any photographer wanting a quick and easy way to create amazing professional web portfolios using flash or html, it could not be easier, likewise the slideshow option is a quick and easy solution for professional looking results.
Lightroom 2 although a slightly shaky upgrade from version 1, offers professional photographers a complete workflow tool, and for all other digital photographers an amazingly powerful and relatively easy to use digital darkroom.

How many serious digital photographers are there who don't use some form of Photoshop? Even if it's the Elements version, Photoshop is so infused in the DNA of digital photography that it's almost synonymous with it. That said, Lightroom is a valuable adjunct to Photoshop, and in fact, there are times when you won't need Photoshop at all.

The bottom line is this--though it has many other features, Lightroom is primarily an organizational tool. With people's digital photo collections often numbering into the thousands or tens of thousands of images, you'll eventually want software that will help you catalog all that. There are other similar organizational tools out there, but Lightroom's flexibility, editing features, and tight integration with Photoshop for when you need more editing horsepower, makes it a winner.

I would strongly recommend buying one of the excellent books on LR 2 here on Amazon, or checking out the many videos and podcasts of LR 2 instruction available online. Read at least the introductory material in those sources BEFORE you import your first photos. This may save you some time if you change your mind about overall organization and have to start over and re-import everything.

I bought LR 2.3 and noticed that it produced a stretched picture in the vertical axis. I tried everything I could for a week, read online docs, read the manual, made sure the driver color handling was turned off, etc, etc. It definitely is not WYSIWIG: I can get a reasonable picture on the screen, but the print out on my Epson 3800 bears no relation to it: It has one dimension stretched enough to make a face look like a fun house mirror.
I am running vista 64 bit, because Adobe brags that the program is 64 bit native. I determined that LR is at fault here, because my windows media picture printer produces ok results, much better than LR.
So I called Adobe support. I got an Indian man whose accent was so bad it was near impossible to understand him. I don't have a prejudice against Indians, I've had many as friends when I was in India, but I wonder why Adobe is so contemtuous of the american worker, that it goes half way around the world to seek out a low quality solution. Anyway, the kicker was that the man told me I need tech support and oh yes, I have to pay for it. (I think $100) This is for a faulty product that does not work. Obviously Adobe is so smug it doesn't think it has to support its products.
At this point, I am going to convert my machine back to 32-bit, on the theory that Adobe's driver is faulty for 64 bit. If that doesn't work, Maybe I can use my photoshop to print out. Another idea is to ditch the program and buy some alternative from Nikon or elsewhere. How do I get my money back? I'm not sure. I don't feel right about selling someone this crippled program. Maybe I can dispute it on the credit card.
That's all for now. Thanks for listening.

-progress report several weeks later
I deduced that LR2 does not run under 64 bit vista correctly. (deduced by noticing that windows media player prints out to my printer OK in 64 bit, but LR no)
So I changed my computer back to 32 bit, and the stretch image problem went away. Color so so. But another problem croppd up. When I cropped image, result showed up on printer OK. BUT when I adjust temperature, exposure, etc., the printer just prints the original image qualities. I could not puzzle out how to save the changes I was making. Nowhere in the help sites or books does it say that you have to save your changes in order to print them. I suspect you don't, and that this is another bug in this program.
Let me relate an experience I just had. I downloaded free Picasa, Google's version of lightroom. It is wonderful! I was reviewing, printing, and editing my photos within 5 minutes of installing it. I still hope I can use Lightroom because of its compatibility with photoshop, but I have my limits. A telling aspect of lightroom is the raft of books, websites, workshops, classes in a book, seminars, forums, blogs, magazines, training DVDs, internet tv shows, all focused on a trivial piece of software. It's amazing the 5 star reviews here: I can only conclude that these people are getting influenced by the hype and Adobe-funded celebrity endorsements. Picasa rocks! It's no photoshop, but archives and prints beautfully! I was using its full features within 5 minutes of install! (I have tens of thousands of pictures, shoot with a Nikon D300 plus extras, so I am at the high end of amateur photographers. If picasa is good enough for me, it will be for the majority, IMO)
-for now