I got Photoshop Lightroom at the weekend and the lynda.com tutorial by Chris Orwig. I’m just over half-way through the tutorials and they are really good. But it’s Lightroom itself that has blown me away. I’ve been using Picasa2 for a good while (and shall continue to do so as it’s so lightweight, easy to use and great for Voxing photos) but had been thinking of getting some more powerful software for managing my photos.

As I have a Macbook, I had considered Aperrture. But I’m still not totally comfortable on the Mac and besides, I don’t fancy editing on a 13″ screen. So I got Lightroom for the PC and it totally rocks. It’s a reasonably intuitive piece of software so that anyone with with a little experience of something like Picasa or iPhoto could jump right in and make sense of it.

One of the biggest features for me in Lightroom is the keywording. I’ve been keywording my jpegs in Picasa for a while and wouldn’t be without it now. What I liked about that was (a) it was easy to do, and (b) the keywords are actually written to the file’s metadata and so travel with the file (IPTC metadata). So, upon importing images into Lightroom, the keywords are all still there. And likewise the reverse: keywording in Lightroom travels back to Picasa.

We are planning to get an iMac (just waiting on Leopard!) for the living room PC so I’ll probably get Lightroom for that as well, although it might be interesting to compare it with Aperture.

The attached photo is exported from Lightroom and uploaded directly from Picasa2. I just finished the tutorial section on greyscale and colour management. This is a result of that.