With the release of Lightroom 2.0, Adobe has created the ultimate raw processing workflow tool in my opinion. It isn’t often, well never really, that I have gotten this excited about a piece of software but Lightroom 2.0 has streamlined my workflow like never before. There are a few features aside from the new localized adjustment tools that haven’t really been advertised but for my workflow – and I am betting many other photographer’s workflows – will be huge improvements. The biggest of these improvements is that now Lightroom can handle seemingly any number of high resolution digital images, both raw and high resolution film scan files.
For a number of years I have been looking for a complete Digital Asset Management (DAM) tool. A DAM tool is a piece of software that helps download, rename, backup, rate, group, catalog, filter, archive and keep track of all my digital images which may be scattered across several hard drives. A DAM will also aid in creating image submissions for clients without me having to chase down all those images individually. In the last several years there have been two well known pieces of DAM software: iView Media Pro (now Microsoft’s Expression media 2) and Extensis Portfolio. Apple’s Aperture was also a potential candidate but it was so slow that it didn’t take long for me to dismiss it as a contender. I tried iView and while it worked well I wasn’t enthralled. I have heard good things about Extensis Portfolio but I never gave it a try. I was hoping Adobe Lightroom would step in and become the end all be all of digital asset management. Well, hold onto your hat, Lightroom version 2 is now a real world working digital asset management tool for photographers!
Continues @ http://blogs.oreilly.com/lightroom