Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 review

Lightroom is barely a year old, but it's remarkably sophisticated for such young software.

Adobe describes it as a digital photography workflow application, handling uploads from memory cards, tagging and sorting, optimising and exporting images to disk, print or the web.

Lightroom 2 builds upon the excellent features discussed in our review of version 1.1. The interface can now be split over two monitors, with layout presets for using the space effectively. There's improved handling of photos stored across multiple disks, including removable storage.

The big talking point is the localised editing tools. Lightroom 1's Red Eye and Spot Removal tools worked on specific areas of a photo, but colour correction was applied across the entire image. The new Adjustment Brush tool allows exposure, saturation, brightness, clarity, contrast and sharpness processing plus colour filters to be applied locally using a brush with variable size, feather and density. An Auto Mask feature makes it easy to follow the contours of shapes within a photo. As with all of Lightroom's editing tools, Adjustment Brush changes are applied non-destructively. The method for applying and managing edits is smart and intuitive. The Graduated Filter applies the same set of processes to block areas of photos with a smooth gradation, making it ideal for boosting colours in skies, for example. The other image-processing tools are tailored for optimising photos, but the lack of barrel and pin-cushion distortion correction remains a notable oversight.

The interface for searching for photos has been overhauled. There are options to show a free text search, metadata and attributes, with the latter covering flags, ratings and colour labels. Metadata is presented in columns, including date, file type, keyword, camera and ISO speed. The number of matching photos is displayed beside each metadata value, and these are updated as photos are filtered by other metadata. Filtering by multiple criteria must be done from left to right, so you might have to reassign columns to filter by keyword, then by date, for example. The text filter includes options such as Contains All and Doesn't Contain, and searches keywords, file and folder names and EXIF and IPTC metadata.

Export for web integrates three animated Flash templates from Airtight Interactive. There's still no online gallery space, though. Professionals will be happy with the HTML and Flash export facilities to upload to their own web space using the FTP upload feature. However, home users will want to use free gallery space. Fortunately, Lightroom's support for third-party plug-ins has spawned various freeware to upload to Flickr, Picasa and others. Jeffrey Friedl's Export to Picasa Web plug-in (http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies/picasaweb) worked flawlessly.

This is a significant update to an excellent application. The upgrade is pricy for software that cost £129 on its launch, but existing users will probably find it hard to resist, while the full price still seems reasonable; the localised editing tools may make a full-blown editor unnecessary.