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Adobe Lightroom is unquestionably the dominant professional photo management application. The question is which Lightroom should you use? Adobe's workflow-oriented photo software is now available as two separate applications: Lightroom CC and Lightroom Clbadic CC, intended for consumers, described here. The denomination is a little confusing, since what is now clbadic is CC. Lightroom Clbadic remains the photo workflow application that defines categories, offering digital professional photographers an easy way to import, organize and fix everything they take. Like its youngest brother, Lightroom Clbadic benefits from Profiles, which offer better ways to start editing from raw camera files, as well as Instagram-style artistic filters. They have also been updated with the new Enhance Details tool for raw camera files.
While there are some excellent competing products such as ACDSee Pro, CyberLink's PhotoDirector, DxO's Optics Pro and Phase One's Capture One, nothing beats the combination of the streaming interface. workflow, organizers and fluid adjustment tools from Lightroom Clbadic. HDR tools, faster performance, face recognition, mobile and cloud application integration are also available, as well as first-rate fixes for lighting, of color, geometry and lens profile. For this, the program gets a rare five-star rating with the PCMag Editor's Choice Award.
A tale of two light rooms
With the release of the re-imagined Lightroom CC, professional program photographers have come to know and love a younger brother and, frankly, still quite immature. Lightroom CC offers a simpler and cleaner interface, but it lacks so many tools, even printing capabilities, that professionals will want to keep up about this review, Lightroom Clbadic CC, who is the true heir to Lightroom's throne. offers all the features of the franchise. Lightroom CC, on the other hand, is better for consumers because it is opposed to applications such as Apple Photos, Google Photos and the included Microsoft 10 Photos application. Even against this group, however, it still looks very much like a version 1.0.
Configuration and pricing options
A Creative Cloud Photography subscription (which costs $ 9.99 per month) gives you not only Lightroom Clbadic CC, but also the full version of Adobe Photoshop (which cost alone up to $ 999), as well than 20GB of online storage. For $ 5 more per month, current Lightroom subscribers can upgrade to 1 TB of storage; for new subscribers, this option totals $ 19.99 per month. This option also adds the all-new lightweight Lightroom CC. Some users simply prefer to pay $ 149 for the current version of Lightroom than to pay $ 120 a year. Lightroom 6 is available as a perpetual license purchase at $ 149, although you do not receive any new features or updates from the camera support.
To install Lightroom, you need a fairly new operating system because it only runs on Windows 7 SP1 to Windows 10 or MacOS 10.11 to 10.13. The Windows version now only works on 64-bit operating systems, so be up-to-date. You install and update with the help of the Creative Cloud utility that is located in the taskbar; you will need a fast Internet connection or a lot of time to start, as it takes almost 2 GB of disk space. You also have the option to download a full 30 day evaluation version.
When I used Lightroom for the first time, a bullet icon bounced off the software nameplate, showing that clicking on it opened a three-way drop down menu. It is here that you enable and disable photo synchronization with Lightroom Mobile, address search for GPS coordinates and face detection.
Interface, import and organization
Unlike Corel AfterShot Pro and Lightroom CC, Lightroom uses modes to organize (library), adjust (develop) and other functions of the program. You can activate and deactivate the mode entries at the top left (and even change their font). By default, the modes now include Library, Expand, Map, Book, Slide Show, Print, and Web. A nameplate appears at the top left when you log in to sync your photos with Lightroom Mobile and Lightroom.com.
Lightroom has a big import button always present and an automatic media detection that launches the non destructive importer. This allows you to view thumbnails and full size images on memory cards before you even import them. Lightroom allows you to start working on any photo from the set before the entire import process is complete. Typically you will want to import photos as Camera Raw files, providing better control of the final images. Lightroom supports camera raw file conversion for every digital SLR and high-end digital camera.
Lightroom imports the images with the help of a database, which Adobe calls catalog. The database approach is suitable for photographers with huge collections of large images, and you can store the database file separately from the actual image files. This is useful if you want to store them on an external medium or NAS. When importing, you can copy, copy as DNG (Adobe Universal Raw Camera File Format), move or add. During the import, the program can create smart previews to speed up editing, ignore duplicates, add them to a collection or apply a preset such as Auto Tone.
Another way to get photos on your computer is to attached he. Especially useful for professional photographers, connection sharing allows you to connect your camera with a USB or FireWire cable and control the shutter release from the computer. In comparison, ACDSee and CyberLink PhotoDirector offer no modem functionality, unlike Capture One. In its February 2019 update, Lightroom Clbadic was getting faster lanyard transfers and control over ISO, shutter speed, aperture, and white balance in the software.
In Library mode, a double-click changes you from a thumbnail view to a view adapted to the screen, and another click to zoom in to 100%. Unfortunately, the zoom is limited to the Fit, Fill and 1: 3 and 1: 2 options, and it does not make good use of the mouse wheel, unlike many other photo editors. You can use a touch screen to zoom in at any level – which I was delighted to see when testing on my Acer T232HL touchscreen. There is even a touch interface with large commands that you can activate by pressing the finger icon.
Lightroom's Library mode offers unparalleled organizational capabilities, including the ability to group images into selected quick collections of thumbnails and smart collections of photos that meet ranking or other criteria. Clbadification, marking and rotation can also be done from the thumbnail. You can use the quick development tools in library mode to turn on pre-defined fixes or effects (B & W, Cross Process, and the usual Instagram-like suspects). A basic fix that you can only do if you switch to Expand, however, is trim, but you can press the R keyboard shortcut to directly access the trimmer, which also offers presets and a level of aspect ratio. .
Another useful tool in Library mode allows you to click thumbnails to apply metadata or adjustment presets. The program also makes it easy to compare images side by side. A survey mode allows you to select multiple images for larger comparison views, and the magnifying tool enlarges the dots for close-up work.
Facial detection
Like Photoshop Elements, his pbadionate level brother, Lightroom offers face detection and recognition. You can use this feature by clicking on the software nameplate at the top left and selecting Face Detection from the drop-down menu. You can also click the face icon in the toolbar in Library mode to access the People view. The latter gives you the ability to start looking for faces throughout your catalog or search only for faces as needed.
To test this, I chose the first option and the program started to detect the faces immediately. He built a grid of unnamed people, piling up those he found to be close enough to be considered one and the same person. It is interesting to see how a person in the same session but with a different expression is sometimes not included in his stack.
After the detection is complete, you type a name in the box with a question mark under the photo or stack, which appears directly in the Named People section. Once you've named a few, Lightroom offers names for unnamed portraits. You just checked if it is correct. It's one of the simplest and simplest implementations of tagging people I've ever seen. Adobe has clearly studied how other applications do this and develop an optimal interface and process. I am also impressed by the fact that in my tests he said that a non-human image – an asphalt pattern – had a face. In my tests, the profiles and faces were partially obscured by hats and other clothing.
Once faces are marked, you can still access them by tapping the same face icon in Library mode, but I also want you to be able to easily create smart albums based on people's names or even use People mode for use the Map mode. Face detection may seem like a consumer function, but pros who shoot events with a lot of faces could certainly make good use of it.
Gross profiles
Most Lightroom users probably know that working with raw camera files provides more room for correction of images. It allows you to change the white balance of the image afterwards and to bring out more detail in overexposed and underexposed areas. Lightroom converts the raw sensor data from the camera into a visible image using a rendering profile. The biggest update from 2018 to date for Lightroom Clbadic (as well as CC and Adobe Camera Raw) concerns his profile choices.
The Profile option already existed in Lightroom and Camera Raw, but it was well below the Camera Calibration section and offered only a few basic choices, most of which were based on the software of your camera manufacturer. They are now at the top of the edit setting panel in the Basic section. These profiles more closely reflect Adobe's color technology than that of the camera manufacturer. This is important because it is the starting point of any other modification you make, so it makes sense to set the option at the top. A disadvantage is that I want this option to also be added to the Fast Development section of Library mode; after all, if that's the first thing you should do, it would make sense to have it there.
For a while, I considered that Capture One had done the best job of raw initial conversion: the images looked better just after importing them and making the adjustments. The Phase One software has brought more detail and color than Adobe's standard Blander profile. The Lightroom CC profiles allow the Adobe program to be at least at Capture One level.
Initial conversion of the Canon EOS 5D Camera Raw file. Adobe standard profile on the left, Capture One in the center, and the Adobe color profile on the right. Click to enlarge.
Profiles are grouped into two basic categories: raw and creative. The first group includes Adobe Raw and Camera Matching Profiles, while creative options include Legacy, Artistic, B & W, Modern, and Vintage. Raw profiles work only with raw images, while the last four are special effects that also work with JPG images.
The Adobe Raw group includes Adobe Color, Monochrome, Landscape, Neutral, Portrait, Standard and Vivid. Adobe Color is the default for newly imported photos. The contrast, warmth and liveliness of the photo are slightly higher than those of Adobe Standard, which is identical to the previous version of Lightroom.
For many of my test shots, especially color portraits and landscapes, I now prefer the initial rendering of Lightroom to that of Capture One. All photos that you have already imported retain the old Adobe standard profile. You may want to go back and switch to Adobe Color or one of the others if you are working on an older photo.
Camera Match Profiles are based on the image rendering of your camera manufacturer. As you might expect, they are designed to match what you see on your camera's LCD screen or the JPG format produced by the camera. I found these less effective than the Adobe profiles. In the test portraits made on a Canon EOS 1D, some were too cold and others too saturated.
The monochrome profile is a better option than starting with a color profile and then converting it to black and white. That's because it starts from the raw image of the camera. Portrait is supposed to reproduce all skin nuances with precision, and Landscape adds a lot more dynamism because there are no face tones to worry about distortion. Neutral has the least contrast, useful for difficult lighting situations, and Vivid emphasizes saturation and contrast.
Creative profiles can remind many people of Instagram filters. I am disappointed that they have names like Artistic 01, Modern 04, etc. I would prefer that the names give an idea of the effect rather than the numbers. For example, Instagram users know what the Valencia filter looks like. Despite this quarrel, the creation profiles really add moods, usually without being exaggerated. In some cases, they produce an improvement in one step. The 17 N & B choices are remarkably varied.
Improve the details
Enhance Details, a new tool for raw camera files, has been integrated into both versions of Lightroom in the February 2019 update. This feature is intended to clarify complex parts of an image. This is a very subtle effect, and for many photos, it does not do much, especially for parts of the photo that contain a seamless texture, such as the sky. You access the feature from the Photo menu (or a shortcut menu), and then a dialog box containing a detailed view of your shots is displayed. Its use creates a new DNGS file on some shots, the difference was not visible at all, and on some it was only visible at 2: 1 magnification. I saw more details in one photo of wet pavement, and this could certainly make a significant difference in large print. However, this does not seem close to a 30% improvement in detail. In the next image, if you click and view in full size, the gravel on the right seems more gritty.
In the photo below, the medallion shows more details to me (but not to those of some of my colleagues). Nevertheless, I am not convinced that it contains 30% more details. Jim Fisher, camera guru at PCMag, tried the functionality of the macOS version on his 5K iKM and achieved equally minimal results.
Setting the photo
In Development mode, sliders for settings such as exposure, contrast, and blacks are all placed in the middle of their zero plot, allowing you to drag them up and down. Having everything set to a baseline 0 and a cursor movement from 100 to -100 makes sense.
The program's shadow and highlight enhancement tools allow you to bring out a dark face without obscuring the bright sky of an image, for example. You can also do this with a setting brush, but the effect is more natural when it is applied using the Lightroom's High and Shadows sliders. Most photo apps nowadays however include shadow adjustment, even free versions of Microsoft Photos and Apple Photos. A basic behavior of all the lighting sliders is that moving them to the left always darkens the image, to the right, lightening it. Other programs have less consistent controls.
In addition to the sliders, Lightroom offers a tool for adjusting the tone curve similar to Photoshop updated in the latest version. You can not only drag sections of the curve up or down to lighten and darken the original values, but you can also use a control directly on the photo to lighten and darken areas with the same value of brightness.
Area-specific adjustments are possible with the Lightroom Adjustment Brush tool. You can apply white balance, noise reduction and moire removal to specific areas of an image.
Selection of the beach mask
The Range Mask selection tool can use luminance (luminous value) or color to refine your selection using the gradient filter, radial filter or adjustment brush. It expands or narrows the selected area according to the light or color. With the latter, you can use a dropper and even a rectangle to choose the color you want to select. This is ideal in cases where you have, for example, a group of very dark objects and want to change the background. I used it in the photo below to illuminate the bird while leaving the rest of the photo alone.
Lens Correction
Lightroom offers a profile-based lens correction for geometry, vignetting, and chromatic aberration. The automatic correction of chromatic aberration of Lightroom is now equal to that of the excellent DxO Optics Pro. Lightroom also does a great job of removing image noise. And if you really want to overload your editing, the Lightroom plug-in feature allows you to add powerful third-party tools such as VSCO Film Essentials and ON1 Effects. An Adobe Exchange panel applet simplifies the installation process of the plug-in.
Vertical perspective correction
The Upright tool, which corrects the geometric distortion resulting from pointing the camera toward a subject, for example, is something that Lightroom shares with Photoshop CC. In Development mode, under Transformer, you see the Right option, which attempts to correct perspective problems such as those encountered with wide-angle lenses. In addition to Disabled, you have five modes of operation for this tool: Level, Auto, Vertical, Guided, and Full. The guided option is perhaps the best. I have tried it on a cityscape and on an indoor photo, and the result has been a marked improvement over the staggered angles of the original.
The application offers you four button options with Upright: Auto, Level, Vertical and Full. Note that when you have people in your shot, especially on the sides of a wide shot, it is harder to get everything that is natural. The application offers control instructions that you can draw on the image to match straight lines, such as building edges or wall joints. The correction appears only after you have drawn two instructions on your photos, but you can add four. (Unfortunately, this was not enough to correct the perspective of my Boundary Warped panorama from the previous section.) In my tests, this feature corrected the perspective very well without distorting people's faces.
A product only to solve this problem, DxO ViewPoint, is another option if this type of correction is important to you. Of course, Lightroom always offers manual sliders to adjust the geometric distortion, but it can be risky, especially when people are in the picture. The vertical is a valuable tool, especially if you are photographing geometric structures such as signage. And that's not something you find in most competitors of the photo workflow.
Healing Brush
Photoshop users will be familiar with the term healing brush. This tool allows you to delete an object from your photo and replace it with a texture and color from another area of the photo. You can even select a non-circular region for the correction. This is a valuable aid because most objects are not perfectly circular and you may wish that the irregular shapes retain the original image. The View Tool Stains setting displays a negative of your image so that you can see the spots that you may have missed. This actually showed me subtle spots on a wall that I had missed in normal mode.
maps
Smartphone cameras record almost all photo location data, such as some standalone cameras such as my Canon EOS 6D DSLR. The Lightroom Map mode can take advantage of this data, indicating the exact location of the photos. Videos, however, are not a fair game for mapping. The program sends the GPS coordinates of your photos to Google for this purpose. You may want to consider your privacy when using Card mode. The map displays the thumbnails of the localized images. Double-click to open them in full size.
Books
Adobe has partnered with the Blurb Self-Publishing Service to provide you with powerful, simple book design and printing. In the Book module, you can edit layouts or completely automate the process with the Auto Layout option. You can choose from several predefined layouts for any page or save your layouts previously designed for later use.
The price of your book is clearly displayed (they start at $ 12.50), so you know where you are going. I've quickly produced a beautiful book in the app in less than an hour, but you could spend a lot more time perfecting the layout. The models of your books can also be exported in PDF or JPG format. For standard photo printing, check out my list of photo printing services.
Sharing photos
Lightroom continues to support not only many output options for which plug-ins are available, but the built-in support of Flickr and Facebook also makes it easy to download to these popular sources. Facebook and Flickr comments are visible inside Lightroom. Very nice. You can also download a video directly on these services or share a photo by email with a right click.
An export option is to submit your images for sale on Adobe Stock. The corresponding export plug-in is installed by default. To start sending your work, you need not only a Creative Cloud account, but also a Stock contributor account, which is quite easy and simply requires ticking a few boxes.
After that, submission is simply dragging photo thumbnails to the Adobe Stock Registration Service area in Library mode and then describing them on the website. Adobe automatically tags recognized objects such as buildings, making things even easier. The hardest part came just when I went to submit my first batch of photos. You must scan an identifier that proves your age. Some of my download attempts for this have been rejected. But who knows? You can finally make money with your hobby.
Unlike Lightroom CC, however, Lightroom Clbadic does not support the embedded sharing features of desktop operating systems. This means that you can not use AirDrop from macOS or the My People feature from Windows 10.
Mobile app
For Creative Cloud subscribers, Adobe offers mobile apps for iOS and Android, and these enhancements continue to improve and take advantage of new platform features. Lightroom for iPad now supports split screen mode and 3D Touch is supported in the iPhone Lightroom app, and you can shoot with live filters enabled. Its Pro mode allows you to manually set the focus, white, balance and shutter speed, as well as the ISO sensitivity, which is very convenient. The main reason for these applications, however, is to be able to edit photos in sync with the desktop program. They do it admirably. For more details, see the comments linked above.
Performance
Lightroom uses your graphics processor for photo settings such as exposure, distortion, radial filters, cropping and panning. If you have a pretty powerful PC, you should not stay in detention for too long with any Lightroom operation, which is not the case with the slower Corel PaintShop Pro (although this has improved recently). The program's startup has also been improved: the old version of Lightroom took about 10 seconds to get ready, while Clbadic took 8 tests.
In previous reviews, I had hoped that Adobe would devote efforts to improving the speed of importing applications, importing raw-format photos into Lightroom still taking a lot of time compared to the competition of Phase One and CyberLink.
For Clbadic, the company claims an improvement in the speed of import. I put this to the test by importing 100 photos from my Canon 6D, each of about 13 MB of file size. I've used Core i7 PC with 16GB DDR4 RAM and a Nvidia GTX 745 graphics card. The previous version of Lightroom took 1 minute and 25 seconds for import. The same import in Clbadic took 1:17. This seems to be a slight improvement, but if you regularly import hundreds or even thousands of images, the difference can be very important.
For comparison, another set of 100 mixed raw images of Nikon and Canon took Capture One 1:38 (minutes: seconds), previews ending 2 seconds later. For the same job, Lightroom completed the import in 2:27 with an additional 28 seconds to complete the standard previews of the building. Lightroom a donc encore du chemin à faire en matière de performances d'importation. Heureusement, vous pouvez commencer à travailler sur les photos avant la fin de l'importation. Si travailler sur des images volumineuses est lent, vous avez la possibilité de le modifier à l'aide des aperçus intelligents moins encombrants.
Stick avec un clbadique
Lightroom Clbadic, déjà au sommet de la clbade, ne s’est amélioré qu'avec l’ajout de profils d’importation bruts. Ses caractéristiques d'organisation de premier ordre; corrections basées sur le profil d'objectif; réglages du bruit et de l'aberration chromatique; Brosse de guérison; et d'autres outils le rendent indispensable pour le photographe professionnel. Lightroom mérite sa réputation en tant que programme apprécié, qui a longtemps été le choix des photographes professionnels et des photographes professionnels, malgré l'imposition d'un abonnement par la société et le regroupement du produit dans deux applications distinctes. Adobe Lightroom Clbadic CC remporte le prix du choix des rédacteurs PCMag pour son logiciel de gestion de flux de photos, ainsi qu'une rare note de cinq étoiles.
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