Why Use Photoshop Lightroom?
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom has gained favor with scores of photographers all around the globe. The reasons for the application's popularity include its image management capabilities, non-destructive editing features and a vast assortment of plug-ins and presets designed to enhance the photographer's workflow. Adobe designed Lightroom with the photographer in mind. Unlike its big brother Photoshop that handles graphics as well as images, Lightroom focuses on the needs of the photographer.
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Image Management Capabilities
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Adobe Lightroom provides a complete image management solution for the photographer. The software allows photographers to catalog, access and maintain images stored on any computer hard drive. Lightroom gives photographers a number of options for searching images within the Lightroom catalog. Photographers can search by relevant keywords, metadata, filename, captions, IPTC and EXIF data and image title. Photographers can also search for images based on image attributes such as flagged images, rated images, color-coded images and original or copy status. Lightroom allows photographers to import and export complete catalogs of images all at once.
Image Manipulation
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One of Lightroom's key features is its ability to edit and manipulate images in a non-destructive manner. In other words, your original image files always remain intact when editing them in Adobe Lightroom. Lightroom lets photographers control every aspect of editing an image. Photographers can edit the white balance, exposure, hue, color and saturation, tone curve, sharpness and noise of any image in the library -- all non-destructively. Additionally, Lightroom offers cropping, red-eye reduction and retouching features directly in the software. With Adobe Lightroom, there's no need to export images to an external software application for editing.
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Plug-in Support
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In the online world, there exists a large community of Lightroom plug-in and preset creators. Plug-ins and presets allow Lightroom to interact with other software and websites, they offer different effects for image editing and they provide additional image management tools in the application. For example, a photographer that has a Photoshelter website can download and install the Photoshelter plug-in. This plug-in allows her to upload images directly from Lightroom to her Photoshelter website without leaving the Lightroom application. Some plug-ins for Lightroom are free of charge, while others require a licensing fee to use.
Additional Considerations
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For photographers who shoot while tethered to a laptop or computer, Lightroom 3 has a built-in tethering featuring. Previous versions of Lightroom required the photographer to use an external tethering application to feed images into Lightroom, but Lightroom 3 no longer has that requirement. Additionally, Lightroom lets photographers quickly create slideshows, print packages and create web galleries.
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