Adobe Photoshop Lightroom v1.0 complete package user reviews (PC & Mac)

1.5 stars

"Considering the amount of beta testing one has to wonder how much Adobe listened to beta testers." on March 3, 2007 by Heebee Jeebies

Pros: Pretty nice interface, though different from any thing Adobe. Fairly decent set of tools.

Cons: Slow, Slow, Slow. Buggy, Buggy, Buggy. Lacking some very basic features like noise reduction, good sharpening and lens distortion correction.

Summary: Considering Lightroom was in beta test for over a year, I don't feel Adobe did to good of a job. They say they listened to the beta testers but I see very little evidence that they did, which seems to be pretty typical. Beta testers didn't like the database idea for storing their images, they wanted noise reduction that worked, they wanted at least Photoshop's Smart Sharpen options and they wanted lens distortion correction tools. Better print layout options, etc.

While I have looked and used most of the other raw processing programs and have found the Lightroom interface and way of working to be the best for me. The lack of even the most basic of digital photography tools, the massive amounts of bugs, the sometimes unintuitive way of how things work (try the crop tool and try dragging the crop frame around, you move it left it goes right move up it goes down, I don't know what they were thinking) and the deathly slow performance on even a high end machine (Adobe promised it would be fast on even a entry level P4 system) and what you have is an expensive product that needs to be fixed quickly. If Adobe waits a year and half to fix and provide the missing features they will find Lightroom going the way of their other dodo products like ImageStyler and LiveMotion.

Time will tell if this lame dock can heal itself or if it is for ever grounded.