Thanks to a new friend from church, I just got Lightroom 3!  I had been using Adobe Lightroom 2 to produce most of the fine images you’ve seen on this blog over the last couple months, but I’m excited to have version 3.  There are several updates that you can see here and if you’re completely unfamiliar with the capabilities of Lightroom in general, check out this link – Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3.

Some of you may be shocked.  “What?! He doesn’t use Photoshop?”

Well… If you clicked on the links above, you’ll realize that Lightroom and Photoshop are two very different programs for editing digital photographs.  Lightroom is designed to handle large batches of photographs, which it organizes into “catalogs.”  Multiple photos can be imported and then edited quickly, due to the photo strip interface along the bottom of the program, and the same effects easily applied to multiple images (which you can do in Photoshop as well, but not as quickly/painlessly).  This is great when you’re trying to organize/edit/produce approximately 1500 photos from a wedding.

One of my favorite features of Lightroom are the presets – some of which come preloaded; others can be found online for free downloading.  I’ll post some before and after pictures at some point.  If you have specific pictures that you’d like to see the before and after, please LET ME KNOW!  Just to let YOU know, I still use Photoshop.  But mainly for additional touch-ups once I’ve done editing in Lightroom or for other things like adding text or crazy effects.  I’m by NO means a Photoshop expert, but I get by.

“Oh man, should I try using Lightroom?”  Definitely try it out – especially if you take a lot of photos and want software to simply keep the photos organized.  Adobe offers a free trial on their website (see above links).