Probablly does wondrous things

Dificult to learn and grossly counter intuitive.

I cannot give a full review because I have only had 30 days experience with this product. It took me about 20 days to get the instruction videos to run (and then only with help fron Lynda.com and none from Adobe). Once running, I found the videos impossible to sort into a logical learning sequence (there are hundreds!). Then I stumbled across a help manual (all 191 pages of it). However, this was so badly written that it was incomrehensible to me.
I am sure that once learned, this is an impressive tool but 30 days are too short and the price is too high to risk not being able to do so.
In case anyone is wondering, I am a professional engineer with a masters degree in mathematics from Oxford.

Customer Service

Essentially non-existant

Similar Products Used:

Abobe photoshop

Version 3 Does have some of the best noise suppression of any program currently out there. For those that have no web skills, the web publishing part of the program can be very handy.

Eats enormous processor and memory resources. Has a steeper learning curve than most similar software.

Guess I'm going to be the stick-in-the-mud here :(
Pretty much dislike everything about lightroom, from the "feature" of showing you photos that aren't really there & NOT showing photos that are, to the absolutely deplorable correction tools (heal, clone, auto tone). If you're thinking of purchasing Lr3 keep in mind that if you have Photoshop, then Adobe Camera Raw comes with it, and does 98% of what Ligtroom does.

Customer Service

none needed yet

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Aperture 3
Bibble 5
Adobe Bridge/ACR
ACDSee

Grad filters, Pre sets, great file management and ease of use.

None

If you shoot RAW I think Lightroom is a must. The grad filters, noise reduction and file management is well worth an upgrade if you already have LR2. If it had cloning, healing and skewing tool I wouldn't even need Photoshop.

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Lightromm 1&2

Most intuitive work flow, great presets and Julianne Costs tutorials Complete picture on Adobe TV. Good tutorials are one of the key of software usability and success.

Lightroom needs at list 2 GB RAM.

Lightroom is without doubt best software to work with digital photos. If you have used Camera Raw Photoshop plugin it is very ease to switch to Lightroom which gives you better work-flow and more intuitive and quick access to files. Good integration with Photoshop and Photoshop pluins extend Lightroom capabilities. Colors produced in Lightroom can not be produced in any other software.

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ACR

Flexible cataloging system
Easy file renaming & tagging
Great tool for sorting the great shots from the just average shots
Good Raw file control/adjustment
Basic image adjustment controls that are easy to learn
Super noise reduction software

LR3 needs a lot of RAM - the more the better!
Many of the functions are not intuitive (eg. Export to create a jpg from a Raw file), so there is a bit of a learning curve

After hearing all the great things about Lightroom, I finally bought it when Adobe ran a $100 off promotion. Having now used it for several months, I can say it is the one piece of software I can't do without!

My primary intention for LR3 was to catalog my images, and it does a great job at that. However, for images that don't require extensive editing that require layers and in-depth post-processing, it does a wonderful job.

LR3 operates very differently than other software I've used, so it took me a little while to get the hang of it, but now that I know what I am doing, it is a real time saver.

Customer Service

Never needed it.

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I only tried Adobe's Organizer (packaged with Elements 8.0) for a little while, and did not like it at all. That is the only cataloging software I've tried.

Previously I spent a lot of time making adjustments to my images in Photoshop Elements 8.0, but since using LR3, I hardly use Elements anymore. And most of the things I continue to use Elements to do, can be done in LR3 but I simply haven't taken the time to learn how to do them.