What Is Adobe Photoshop Lightroom?

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is a digital photo management and post production tool for photographers. Lightroom allows photographers to use a variety of tools to improve their digital photos as well as organize them. The first version of Lightroom was released on January 29, 2007 and version 2.0 was released a little over a year later on July 29, 2008.

System Requirements

Users working on a computer with a Windows operating system must have an Intel Pentium 4 processor, Windows XP with Service Pack 2 or Vista. Mac users must have a PowerPC G4 or G5 Intel based processor and Mac OS X 10.4 or 10.5 is required. Both Mac and Windows users must also have at least 1GB of RAM and 1GB of space available on their hard drive. A 1024x768 display and a CD-ROM drive are also required.

Hardware

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom allows users to use more than one display so that they have a larger on-screen work space. This allows users to see more detail on their photographs, which is definitely useful when trying to touch up photographs. Lightroom also allows its users to make use of their Windows or Mac 64-bit processor. This can help photographers post production work go more quickly as a 64-bit processor offers users more speed.

Organization

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom allows its users to import large amounts of photos from their digital camera or their camera's memory card quickly. It also allows its users to rename their digital photo files automatically and sort them into folders, making them easier to locate later. Lightroom users are also able to organize their digital photos from multiple drives and view high-resolution previews even when their originals are offline.

Post Production

Photographers can adjust the color, exposure and tonal curves of their digital photos non-destructively on several raw formats as well as on JPEG, TIFF and PSD files. The adjustments that photographers make to their photos in Lightroom are also more accurate because they are able to target specific areas of their photos.

Printing and Exporting

There are a wide variety of plug-ins that Lightroom users can add to the program that make it quick and easy for them to export their photos to sharing sites and photo labs. Users are also able to arrange photos, using customizable templates, to use paper and ink efficiently whether printing one or several pages of photos in varying sizes. Lightroom will automatically sharpen photos when a user exports them to a website or sends them to the printer.