Rob Brooks-Bilson

Over the past year, I've upped my digital photography skills quite a bit. One of the tools I now find I can't live without is Adobe Lightroom. I've been running version 1.x for the better part of a year now, and am happy to announce that version 2.0 has just been released.

In case you are wondering what Lightroom is, or why you would want to use it over something like Photoshop, let me first say that I use both Lightroom and Photoshop CS3 for most of my post processing. I use Lightroom to "develop" my digital images (from RAW and jpg) and to catalog them. For organization, it's much better than Adobe Bridge. I also make lots of corrections in Lightroom such as straightening and cropping images, tonal adjustments, etc. All of those corrections are non-destructive, so you can always go back to the original image at the click of a button. Lightroom also has plugins for exporting directly to Flickr.

Lightroom 2.0 takes things up a notch by adding lots of heavily requested features such as:

• Local adjustment brush
• Enhanced organizational tools
• Volume management
• Extensible architecture
• Multiple monitor support
• Flexible print package functionality
• Streamlined Photoshop CS3 integration
• Enhanced output sharpening
• 64-bit support for Windows® and Mac OS

Of all these enhancements, Local Adjustments is probably the most important. In previous versions of Lightroom, all editing applied to the entire image. With local adjustments, you can now apply editing such as dodging and burning to selected parts of an image - something you could previously do only in Photoshop. This means that photographers will be able to spend more time in Lightroom for tasks that previously required Photoshop, which should help increase workflow productivity overall.

I tried Lightroom 2.0 during the beta, and now I'm really excited about upgrading from my current version.

I'm here in Chicago this week for the Adobe MAX 2007 conference. Following tradition (well, now that I've done it twice, it's a tradition), I've created a Flickr Group for posting pictures of the event. It's a public group, so feel free to post pics and share the group link:

http://www.flickr.com/groups/adobemax2007/

You can see pics from last year's Flickr group by following the related link below.

For all you paparazzi out there heading to MAX 2006 in Las Vegas, I've created a Flickr Group for posting pictures of the event. It's a public group, so feel free to post pics and share the group link:

http://www.flickr.com/groups/max2006/

I finally had a chance to post some of my initial CFUNITED pictures to the CFUNITED Flickr Pool. If you haven't checked out the pool yet, it's a place where anyone attending the conference can go and post pictures for everyone to see.

I (and hopefully others) should be adding more pictures soon.

Adam Crump and I are headed off to CFUNITED this morning. It's going to be a long day as we're flying into Philly and driving down from there...

Just a reminder. If you haven't checked it out yet (or joined), I have created a Flickr Pool for CFUNITED where you can post and view pictures from the conference, as well as create discussion threads. If you haven't seen Flickr yet, it's definitely worth checking out. Who will be the first to upload some pics???

With CFUNITED just around the corner, I thought I'd go ahead and create a CFUNITED Flickr Pool for anyone attending this year's conference to post pictures and discuss the event. In case you haven't used Flickr, it's the most amazing (and addictive) photo sharing site ever created. If you don't have an account, you can create one for free, as there's no obligation.

So, feel free to join the pool and post as many pictures from CFUNITED as you like. The more, the better. I'm looking forward to seeing each and every one of you there!