I was able to spend about 30 minutes playing with the new Adobe Lightroom 2.0 software last night after being encouraged by Jon whose blog is here and whose photo site is here.  I’d been using v1.4 and v2.0 is well worth the upgrade.   I was really thankful that they added the brush mask tool to edit portions of the picture’s exposure, contrast, brightness, sharpness, clarity, color, and saturation.  So now, instead of applying edits to the photo as a whole, one can emphasize or highlight portions of the photo with these effects.  Adobe PS could always do this, but it is just nice to be able to do it all in LR now.

The general load time of the program has greatly improved, though the memory usage (300-400mb) on my Lenovo Thinkpad X60s (1.6ghz, 2gb ram) may force me to upgrade hardware should I ever make my photography hobby more of a business.  I did encounter some general instability with LR crashing (could also be my hardware…) but hope that will be cleared up in the future updates.  I was happy to hear about multiple monitor support (despite not actually  being able to test it), as well as support for catalogs across multiple external hard drives, and other general work flow aids.  At first the gradient filter masks (able to add exposure, contrast, brightness, sharpness, clarity, color and saturation gradients) were confusing to me, but I’m starting to see the power of the new tool.  Here is the result of a quick test, before and after applying a few gradient masks messing with the exposure.

BEFORE: AFTER:

flower_before

 flower_after