Lightroom 2.0 beta
I was about to ditch Lightroom for Aperture, especially with the new features Adobe throws in a beta 2.0 version.
I had a number of gripes with Lightroom, namely:
- Vignettes. Lightroom apparently considered Vignette as a lens correcting utility rather than for artistic purposes. As such, on a cropped image, applying vignette corrections will affect only the original uncropped image and may not appear on the cropped image.
- Watermark. Watermarking in Lightroom 1.0 was extremely pathetic that it was virtually unuseable.
Now I read through the Release Notes. The 2.0 beta apparently now adds a “framing vignette effect” that “will apply a vignette to an image, respecting the cropped borders.” Ok, that’s good.
But there is no mention on improving the watermarking.
One feature that looks interesting is Lightroom’s new “Localized Correction” feature:
The develop module now provides the ability to correct specific areas of an image without affecting other areas. A common example of this in traditional photography would be the dodge and burn experience in the darkroom. Lightroom provides brushes that a photographer can ‘load’ with different types of corrective techniques that were previously only available globally including exposure, brightness, clarity and saturation. Images can also be tinted locally using specific hue and saturation values that can provide an excellent way of counteracting mixed lighting environments.
I wonder, was it coincidence that Aperture also released an upgrade that allows for dodge-and-burn? The question: is Lightroom’s new functionality a destructive one? In Aperture, the doge-and-burn plugin is done on an exported copy of the image.
All in all, this means I will hold off moving to Aperture until I test out Lightroom’s new version.
April 03 2008 10:59 am | Software
