Adobe Photoshop Lightroom
Not very often you come across a piece of software so complete, so full of nice surprises, so comprehensive in scope and functionality. I was a beta tester, I installed the trial, I decided to buy it and never looked back.
I'm not going to post a full review, I just wanted to say how fascinating it is using Lightroom. Every single day I learn a new thing, I dive more into the abyss of functions and features and every single time it puts a smile on my face.
I initially thought that Lightroom is just for RAW photography workflow (non-destructive exposure control, etc.). It turns out to be that on top of that, it gives you massive metadata, labelling and generally cataloging functionality which can be used on all sorts of images. What is more, you can clone pictures for editing and "stack" them with the originals. Moving on, you discover it's amazing usability in terms of sorting out pictures, comparing shots and selecting collections of pictures.
It has this "spray" tool with which you can "spray" your thumbnails with keywords, colored labels, flags, metadata and others. This can make sorting out or querying for pictures tremendously easier! How on earth did they come up with that idea! :-)
I have now put most of my pictures (30,000+) in its database and slowly I will be adding more and more metadata making it my definitive image source. And to make things even better, Lightroom is using internally a SQLite database, which makes it even easier to build your own tools around it. There's plenty of support for all kinds of languages.
For those of you who never experienced Lightroom, I urge you to go and download a copy and give it a shot. It has the most innovative and intuitive UI I have ever seen in a software application.
I'm not going to post a full review, I just wanted to say how fascinating it is using Lightroom. Every single day I learn a new thing, I dive more into the abyss of functions and features and every single time it puts a smile on my face.
I initially thought that Lightroom is just for RAW photography workflow (non-destructive exposure control, etc.). It turns out to be that on top of that, it gives you massive metadata, labelling and generally cataloging functionality which can be used on all sorts of images. What is more, you can clone pictures for editing and "stack" them with the originals. Moving on, you discover it's amazing usability in terms of sorting out pictures, comparing shots and selecting collections of pictures.
It has this "spray" tool with which you can "spray" your thumbnails with keywords, colored labels, flags, metadata and others. This can make sorting out or querying for pictures tremendously easier! How on earth did they come up with that idea! :-)
I have now put most of my pictures (30,000+) in its database and slowly I will be adding more and more metadata making it my definitive image source. And to make things even better, Lightroom is using internally a SQLite database, which makes it even easier to build your own tools around it. There's plenty of support for all kinds of languages.
For those of you who never experienced Lightroom, I urge you to go and download a copy and give it a shot. It has the most innovative and intuitive UI I have ever seen in a software application.
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