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Photoshop Lightroom 2.0 has been out for not so much then a day, and I’ve before that time heard from a number of lower classes asking about the new version released Tuesday. A few current users have asked if it’s credit the $99 upgrade from Lightroom 1.0 (). Others who have been on the sword-play about investing in a $299 photo workflow utensil have asked in regard to what Adobe did that make Lightroom 2.0 an improvement upward of the initial release. (I’ve also gotten a couple of the inevitable, “Which do I choose: Aperture or Lightroom?” questions, to which I say, download the 30-day demos and see which one feels right to you.)

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I’m currently working on Macworld’s review of Lightroom 2.0, but in the present life’s a quick summary of five key enhancements that I think make it a compelling upgrade.

Selective editing

One of the problems with the first translation of Lightroom was its lack of selection-based adjustments. Any changes you made to a photo were applied to the entire image. For many photos, this wasn’t a problem—changing the exposure, color balance, or other tonal setting throughout an image made sense. But, if you had an image that had a exactly exposed sky and an underexposed foreground, for example, you couldn’t selectively vary the foreground in the absence of making the sky look bad.

To make those types of changes in Lightroom 1.0, you needed Photoshop or one more image-editing application. You would edit the image out of Lightroom, and then be in possession of to deal with a second rendition (or third or fourth, depending upon how much you edited it) of a photo in your Lightroom library.

Lightroom 2.0’s Adjustment Brush tool addresses that shortcoming by letting you create masks that change only the talents of a photo you want to alter. With the brushes, you select the type of enhancement you desideratum and whether you want to increase or decrease the effect; in that case, simply “paint” with your mouse over the area you want to change. If you brush a little aggressively in places, you can hold from the top to the bottom of the Option clew and action the areas you don’t want affected. In the image shown below, I’ve used an Exposure-based Adjustment Brush to darken the areas around my subject. (The area in red is the true masked area—Lightroom lets you toggle that overlay view onward and off when you are picture an effect.)

The Adjustment Brush works with the primary Lightroom image-adjustment controls—Exposure, Saturation, Brightness, Contrast, Sharpness, Clarity and Color—and you be able to mix and match those controls on any masked region. You have power to also save a definite group of settings as a preset, and Adobe includes a Soften Skin preset that works surprisingly well.

And, if you want more than a brush, Lightroom 2.0 includes a Graduated Effect tool that works in a similar manner, letting you add an effect that gradually increases or decreases from one side of to the other an area you choose.

Better filtering tools

Finding images in your catalog with Lightroom 1.0 wasn’t the most honest process, although, once you got the hang of the program’s idiosyncrasies, it worked. With Version 2.0, finding and filtering your images is a great deal of easier, via the recent Library Filter bar, which puts all of the primary pursuit options right at the top of the screen. From that one location, you can search against text associated with your photos (file name, keywords, captions, and so onward); attributes like rating, color label, and flag; and any camera metadata saved with an representation of an object.

The great thing about the Filter hinder is that it quickly and easily lets you get to a group of images based upon multiple criteria. In the screenshot below, I was able to quickly select all images shot with a Canon EOS 5D and the 85mm f/1.2 lens that had a minimum rating of two stars and had my “To Print” label applied. It was possible to get to this refined group of images with Lightroom 1.x, if it be not that nowhere near as quickly. As an added premium, I have power to at this moment subsist in time for my filters as presets.

Smart albums

Apple’s Aperture, iTunes, and iPhoto have had them for years, and Adobe finally has Smart Album skin in the game with Lightroom 2.0—they’re just called Smart Collections. As is the case by Apple’s apps, you be possible to create a collection (Lightroom’s term for a photo album) of photos using a set of criteria (identical to that used in the Filter bar), and then save it viewed like a set that automatically updates as you add and edit images in your library. It’s a small, nevertheless extremely welcome, enhancement.

Multiple monitor support

A major productivity enhancer that the pair Photoshop and Aperture have—support for more than one display—is now part of Lightroom. Many photographers work in the field on a portable, and then have a second display in their studio, which gives them much more space to compare, pick out, pick out, and edit images. Again, it’s a little thing, but for many of us, it will make Lightroom a much other thing powerful tool.

Better Photoshop integration

Lightroom doesn’t counterfeit to be an all-things-to-all-people type of application, and it lacks the deep compositing and editing functionality that you find in a program like Photoshop. Version 1.0 had the capability to export photos to Photoshop, letting you make adjustments and save your edits back in Lightroom as a copy.

With Lightroom 2.0, Adobe has made it a bit easier to “round-trip” your photos with Photoshop. There are menu options for automatically creating panoramas and high dynamic range (HDR) images from a election of photos, and you can also unenclosed up a Lightroom image as a Smart Object layer in Photoshop, which lets you preserve changes made in Photoshop in Lightroom. This latter feature is tremendously important grant that you want to make further changes to a photo that has even now been edited; your changes are preserved when you go to Photoshop.

There are a few more changes under the hood, but these five are the ones that have made the most impact on me as I’ve been working with the betas and the final release of Lightroom 2.0. Stay tuned for the final review.

[Rick LePage is a former Macworld editor, and runs the photo printer site Printerville.]