In February of 2007 Adobe released Lightroom which has turned out to be a breakthrough in Photo management and editing for photographers. Before Lightroom the photo-editing software of choice was either Photoshop or it’s little brother Photoshop Elements. Photoshop has evolved over the years as a tool for graphic designers and photographic use was an after thought. Photoshop Elements is better but not much.

About 5 years ago a Realtor friend asked me what software he should use to edit his real estate photos. Without hesitation I said, “Photoshop”. So he marched right out and spent over $600 for a copy of Photoshop. He never had time to learn to use it to do the basic real estate photo-editing that he wanted to do. This has always been an embarrassment and to this day I help him with his real estate photo-editing and layout work.

Lightroom, on the other hand, was designed for Photographers from the ground up and it is clear and intuitive. Lightroom does much more than refining and editing photos. It catalogs them, helps sort out the best photos, creates slide-shows and prints photos. Lightroom is designed to help you through the whole photographic work flow from the camera memory all the way through the process to getting them printed or on the web. But the biggest area I think Lightroom shines is helping you to quickly getting from an OK photo to one that snaps.

For example, the photo below came out of the camera needing a little improvement. It’s dull and lifeless and a little to yellow-orange because of the strong incandescent light over the table, it needs to be cropped on the left (because of the plant leaves).

Once in Lightroom these defects can quickly be fixed. To get the photo below I cropped the left, used a slider to quickly make the white-balance a little cooler, changed with contrast a little and increased the saturation of the of just the reds and greens and sharpened the photo a little. The whole process took about a minute. All this would have taken at least 20 times as long in Photoshop or Photoshop Elements.

There is no having to understand layers in Lightroom, you just move sliders and intuitive controls to make the changes you want. As a result I have no reservations recommending Lightroom to Realtors that do their own photography. It’s easy to learn and easy to use. Maybe I should buy my Realtor friend a copy of Lightroom to pay him back for my bad advice.