Adobe steps up

About a year and a half ago, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 1.0 launched to a fairly positive reception, especially given the shortcomings in its main competitor, Apple's Aperture. But now that Apple has addressed many of the major problems with Aperture, Lightroom now faces some stiff competition in the RAW workflow arena. The recent release of Lightroom 2.0 is Adobe's attempt to strike back at Aperture 2.0, and we've taken a close look at the new release to see just much it advances Adobe's game.

While some of the new things in 2.0 are tweaks that you'd expect in a second-revision product, Lightroom also supports some significant additions that aim to raise the feature bar for RAW image processing. The much-touted localized adjustments feature, which attempts to bring some Photoshop-level control to RAW image processing, is headlining this release's feature set. Lossless RAW image editing is a bit of a holy grail for digital image processing, so the more granular control we're given over RAW images, the closer we'll be to that digital imaging grail.

But Lightroom 2.0 isn't just about localized edits—there are a lot of other additions that warrant a closer look.

System requirements

Mac OS Microsoft Windows G4 or G5 processor or Intel

OS X v10.4 or above

1 GB of RAM

1 GB of available hard disk

1,024 x 768 screen

CD-ROM drive Intel Pentium 4 or equivalent processor

Microsoft Windows XP SP2, Windows Vista Home Premium, Business,

Ultimate, or Enterprise (32- and 64-bit editions)

1 GB of RAM

1 GB of available hard disk

1,024 x 768 screen

CD-ROM drive

Test hardware

MacBook Pro Santa Rosa Core2 Duo 2.4 GHz

200 GB Seagate 7200.2 SATA HD

4 GB RAM

OS X 10.5.4

Mac Pro Quad Core2 Duo Xeon 2.8 GHz

7 GB RAM

OS X 10.5.4

Test software

Apple Aperture 2.1.1

Bibble Pro 4.10

Phase One Capture One 4.1.1

Library Module Changes

Overall, the 2.0 interface too isn't much different from Lightroom 1.0—the same main five panels remain, and some things, like metadata browsing by lens, rating, etc., have been put at the top of the Library interface. Nonetheless, the 2.0 interface does sport a few significant new features.

Better disk-based image management

The one thing that has always bothered me about the cached library approach to image management is that it creates a middleman between you and your files. In effect, you're presented a web page that links to your images—it's not live and you never know what's really on your disk at any given time, so invariably things get out of sync. To make matters worse, if you had content on other disks then Lightroom 1.x didn't show which disk they were on; it displayed only the name of the imported folder. Lightroom 2.0 attempts to clear away the abstraction by adding a disk-based browser to the Folders Library module, so you can see more clearly where images are located on-disk and you can keep folders synchronized should images be added from outside of Lightroom itself.

The color block to the left of the disk name shows a visual indicator of how full your disk is, going from green to red as it gets more and more full; an offline disk will appear as gray. The info to the right of the disk name can be set to show photo count, free disk space, or disk status. Since the folders shown are still only ones that have been imported and not the whole file structure on the disk itself, it's not very useful as an import tool.

The ability to synchronize content from each folder, with the option to delete or add any missing images, is a welcome addition and one I know that I'll be using often.

This synchronization feature works as you'd expect, and while it's very handy, my main problem with it is that it's pretty slow. When working with a folder containing 900+ images, it took around 20 seconds to find two new images and import them. I could have gone to the Finder and dragged and dropped them onto Lightroom's icon in a fraction of that time. Also, there's no option to auto-import from an existing folder with images in it, so you're forced to hit synchronize every time you want to keep the folder current. An automatic synchronize feature would be pretty nice to see here, so hopefully that's coming sooner than later. In spite of its flaws, though, the synchronization feature is big help for clearing up the confusion that inevitably arises between what's a cached library vs. what's actually on the disk.