Despite its name and unlike Photoshop Elements, Adobe’s Photoshop Lightroom is NOT a lighter version of Photoshop. In order to avoid any confusion, from now on I’ll use only the name Lightroom when referring to Photoshop Lightroom.
Some retouching, such as cropping or changing the contrast or brightness of a picture, can be done in either Photoshop or in Lightroom, though not always with the same simplicity or flexibility. On the other hand, other things can be done in only one of those two software applications: working with layers, compositions and complex retouching can be done only in Photoshop, while Lightroom excels at cataloguing and finding pictures, assign them geographical coordinates, etc…
The uses of Lightroom are, among others:
- cataloguing, including advanced filtering thanks to the classification methods (by stars rating or color assignment), keywords and the mapping with GPS coordinates
- pictures improvements such as cropping, color and contrast enhancements, etc…
- making simple retouches, such as red eye correction or spot removal
- optimization of pictures for impression, e-mail or internet publishing
- creation of slideshows
- creation of web albums
Lightroom is multilingual and is available for Mac and PC. A fully functional 30-day trial version can be downloaded from Adobe’s website.
In my next post, I’ll give you what are for me the 10 main reasons to use Lightroom. And then, I’ll start a series of tutorials to explain how to use it.
