Digital Home Thoughts: Ars Technica Reviews Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2

"While some of the new things in 2.0 are tweaks that you'd expect in a second-revision product, Lightroom also supports some significant additions that aim to raise the feature bar for RAW image processing. The much-touted localized adjustments feature, which attempts to bring some Photoshop-level control to RAW image processing, is headlining this release's feature set. Lossless RAW image editing is a bit of a holy grail for digital image processing, so the more granular control we're given over RAW images, the closer we'll be to that digital imaging grail. But Lightroom 2.0 isn't just about localized edits-there are a lot of other additions that warrant a closer look."

Ars Technica wasted no time in getting their review of Lightroom 2 out the door - I'm waiting for my copy to arrive from Adobe, then I'll be taking it for a spin. If there are three words to describe the changes in 2.0, it seems "more like Photoshop" would be a good fit. They've adding masking tools to allow you to make selections, then alter those selections. So if you're processing a RAW file and you want to boost the exposure only in the sky, you can do that. That has some powerful possibilities, so I'm looking forward to seeing what I can do with the new version of Lightroom. I'm also looking forward to (hopefully) the bug fixes they put into 2.0. Version 1.4.1 still has bugs around something as simple as deleting an image. Let's hope 2.0 can do what 1.x hasn't managed to do: not frustrate me every five minutes. Call me an optimist, but I have high hopes!