Why I love Adobe Lightroom

Yesterday I went on a really nice trip to Stirling Castle and like every good tourist, I took some snaps to remember the day by. The weather was very changeable, ranging from gusting winds and rain to bright sunshine, which made taking good snaps difficult so I resorted to the quick and easy option — set camera to automatic mode and deal with proper exposures, changing compositions, etc in the digital darkroom. I shoot RAW at all times, there really is no other option!

So to cut down on the babble, I simply figured it would be nice to show a quick sample of the sheer awesomeness that is Lightroom with a before/after pic.

Before/After

Click image for full-sized version

With a few settings changes within Lightroom, it was easy to change an otherwise ordinary snap into something really nice (if I do say so myself). I was able to vastly improve the look of the sky which was extremely washed out, brought out the details in the shadows, improved the saturation of the stone to more lifelike and distributed the tones more evenly as the original was far too contrasty.

The total time working on that photo? Probably somewhere around 60 seconds! I could probably, eventually, achieve something similar in Photoshop but it would certainly take a lot more time and huge amounts of effort to get it just right. Lightroom lets me get it right, very quickly.

Before

After

This sheer simplicity is why I love Lightroom, quite apart from the organisational aspects (folders, sets, tagging, multiple-versions of the same photo, etc.) which I might write a blog post about some time in the future.

Stirling Castle Esplanade Before/After