At last, Adobe has released Lightroom this week. If you haven’t heard about this program yet, it is time to pay a little attention as it could change a lot of ways you work with your image collection. Adobe has done something a bit different in the development of this software, in that it has gone through a multitude of public beta versions before this production release at version 1.0. And with a public beta, you get a lot of enthusiastic feedback from A LOT of photographers. And it is particularly nice that this program was developed specifically for the needs of photographers, with key inputs from a lot of leaders in the digital imaging fields.

For me, I believe Lightroom is going to streamline my workflow quite a bit from downloading images from memory cards, sorting and editing, keywording, processing RAW images, and ultimately getting them to their final versions. Right now I use Nikon Transfer to download images from my flash cards, I then rough edit in Adobe Bridge, add keywords in Adobe Bridge, and then do image adjustments in Adobe Camera Raw and ultimately then in Photoshop. My images are organized in folders and sub-folders by subject matter, but I have had an increasing need to have them cross-referenced, keep track of which I have granted licensing rights to, print sales, and so forth. This requires use of a database and digital asset management (DAM). I originally tried IMatch, and found it to be a pretty good program, very powerful, but a bit cumbersome on the interface and very slow to import images. Then I tried IView MediaPro (3.1.2). A very nice program, considered by many to be the standard to beat for DAM. But, unfortunately, IVMP does not play nice with Network drives – and all my images are stored on a NAS (Network Attached Storage) device. It basically brings the program to a severe crawl unless you employ some cumbersome workarounds. I also didn’t like how you could not group similar keywords together – they are all alphabetical. Adobe Bridge was working for my keywording, but it is pretty slow when adding them to large files.

Lightroom addresses some areas for me for asset management, even though it is a youngster in this department with a lot of growth required to really catch up to competitors features. Keywording is a dream and fast. I can group keywords together – for example to keep all my bird species in one group – as opposed to alphabetical all over the entire list. Lightroom also has categories – where I can cross-reference images with similar features that may not be stored in the same folders on my network drive. I can also keep categories for licensed images, print sales, etc. Another pretty cool sorting feature is its Metadata browser, where I can sort images by the lens I used, the date/month they were shot, camera, etc – all automatically from data already stored within the image file by the camera.

So this addresses some of my primary needs nicely, and I haven’t really touched the heart of the program in its RAW file developing, print layout, and web gallery creators. I like the interface a lot – it is sleek, intuitive, and easy to use. Most of all, it makes me look forward to organizing my images and making it fun – not a chore. And that is worth its weight in gold if you ask me.

I’ll post now and then about my experiences with this great program, but there are many other blogs and forums out there to keep you up to date on FAQs, news, tips and techniques, tutorials and a growing number of power users for Adobe Lightroom. Heck, they are even creating an entire magazine about it from the folks over at NAPP. So it is worth checking out to see if it is for you. Adobe is offering 30 day trial downloads right now, and through April, a special pricing offer. So get in on the ground floor, this program will only continue to grow and offer more for photographers.