Adobe® Photoshop® Lightroom® 2 for Digital Photographers Only

preface

With Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2, I have to say, "Wow!" After working with it from the start of its development by Adobe, I really feel at home with this software, not because it is a great piece of software, but because it is truly going to revolutionize the way photographers work with photos. It brings me back to working in the traditional darkroom, something I had longed to do with color, but really only felt successful with black-and-white. I now have the control over a color image that photographers have longed for.

The great LIFE magazine photographer Andreas Feininger once said that the uncontrolled photograph was a lie (and this was more than 40 years ago, before Photoshop) because it misrepresented the way we saw reality. He felt that truth could only come when the photographer controlled the image so that it truthfully represented how we saw the world. Of course, a photographer can control an image and lie, too, but this has always been true. Feininger would find that Lightroom allows the photographer the control needed to bring photos back to the truths of black-and-white photography.

Lightroom's ability to give photographers a totally integrated program, from editing and organizing to image processing to photo sharing, is unmatched by any other Adobe program. Plus it offers some amazing processing capabilities, as you will soon learn, that no one else is doing. I love the way the program handles images and makes working with them intuitive and a joy.

The official ...