Trigger Finger

Adobe Lightoom is the premium Digital Darkroom for photographers. It combines a multitude of library features and combines them with some very powerful editing and processing tools in the package. Having got my first DSLR camera almost one month ago, I became quickly aware of how much I needed something to keep track of all my pictures, and something that I could use to process them, especially when shooting in RAW format. I looked at many options, Picasa2 from google, Expression Media from Microsoft, Windows Live Gallery which is part of their Live packages, CaptureNX which is Nikon’s own software, GIMP combined with ufraw, and so on.

But I found every package lacked something. Here is a very very quick overview of the four better packages I tried and my ratings on the things that were important to me.

Its no surprise looking at the prices that you have two very different categories of software here. Obviously most people will be drawn to the free alternatives first. None of these applications are bad applications, they all do a very good job provided you pick the right one for your needs.

The two free ones, Picasa and Windows Live Photo Gallery are very good general purpose library managers for the average point & shoot camera user. They have decent, if limited, editing options for fixing red eye, cropping etc etc. I would recommend Microsoft Live gallery slightly over picasa due to its better editing tools and better handling of RAW images. Picasa also tended to crash fairly often so I would definitely try MLPG first. By all means try both of them and if they suit, then they don’t cost a penny! If you find yourself frustrated in not being able to manipulate them in the way you want to then step up to the paid ones.

Then you have the two heavyweights pitched in terms of price and features at the more serious photographer, Lightroom and Expression Media. They both have excellent library features and more powerful editing and processing tools. Lightrooms features on the editing and processing side though are really in a league of their own. The test of this is that not once have I felt the need to fire up photoshop to fix or edit these images, whereas occasionally I was forced to do so by some tool missing from the Expression Media feature set.

The thing that really makes Lightroom stand out though is the vast array of plugins and presets available and the SDK which allows the kind hearted people of the internet to create all kinds of useful tools that plugin into Lightroom. For instance Lightroom misses an (important to me) feature to export directly from a RAW file to flickr. So someone wrote a plugin, a very very extensive plugin as good as any of the standalone flickr uploaders you find.

The thing that has really helped me has been the developing presets. As a new photographer I am still bamboozled at times by histograms and the creative side of manipulating the data of the images to produce the results I want. Being able to download preset Developing settings is great for a quick result, but even better for learning what the authors of the presets have changed to reach such a result.

So for the benefit of everyone I will add two very nice packages of presets to this post that give you 80-90 different presets, from ones that make you image look like a polaroid, to others that make it look like an HDR image, and of course everyone’s favourite… presets that make your image look like something from the movie ’300.’ These are available for free and produced by the kind people in the photography world, and for that I am eternally grateful for their time as they have provided a lot of inspiration already, and best of all an understanding of what all those knobs, buttons and sliders actually do!

Please let me know which of these you found best for your needs, and if you have any better alternatives, or know of great plugins or presets, then lets have them in the comments section! For my results so far, check out my flickr feed on the right.

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