Lightroom 2.1

I'm back from my workshop in the Eastern Sierra's with Alain Briot and will write up my impressions of the experience soon.

In the meantime, note that a release candidate of Lightroom 2.1 has been placed on the Adobe site here. There are many small fixes that are part of 2.1, but the key one for me is a fix to the interoperability between Lightroom and CS3/CS4. One of the fancy things that was supposed to work between Lightroom 2.0 and Photoshop CS3 was a seamless transfer of a photo back and forth between the two products. I remember seeing demos of this transfer and thinking about how good it was.

Of course, when I tried it, I found that the transfer wouldn't work at all. There was a partial work-around on the support forum, but certainly not the seamless experience I was banking on.

Yesterday, I downloaded 2.1 and purchased CS4 (my refund for my purchase of CS3 came through on my credit card). After installing both products, I tested the file transfer between them and, hey presto, the transfer was seamless. I was able to do neat stuff like saving a file under a new name in CS4 and seeing it appear automatically in my Lightroom DB without importing it.

I think Adobe might be getting their shit together at last!

PS: CS4 is a HUGE improvement over CS3 and its predecessors from a UI point of view. The concept of having each open image in its own tab is very well executed. There are several other neat visual tricks too. For example, when you are using the clone or heal tools, the predicted result of the operation is contained inside the circle that are using to define the affected area. You can preview the result and then click with your mouse to apply it. Neat! In addition, the vibrance control from Lightroom and ACR is now available as a Photoshop adjustment.

On the downside, I tried the new transformation function that clones/subtracts out less important parts of the image to shrink or grow it. The controls work fine and the preview looked really good. However, when I tried to apply it, CS4 gave me an "out of memory" error message. I didn't have time to see if closing down some tabs would free up the memory, but be aware that this is a potential issue.