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Adobe have just released the final version of Lightroom 2 with a number of new fetaures including most notably local editing and multi monitor support. Upgrade pricing starts at $165 and full version at $489

Details HERE

I've been playing with the beta for some time and I'm quite impressed with the new features (did I mention local editing )

Local editting! that's something that really attracts me!!

Is that price the RRP? Do software sellers usually sell at the RRP? Or can they sell below the RRP (like Canon sellers).
Where to get the best price?

Looks good!

Adam that price is at the Adobe online store. When it becomes available through retail channels the online discounters will no doubt shave that a little. In the meantime why not download the demo and try it out.

... Obsolete ...

Stubbsy, those prices you mentioned don't show up on the Adobe site.
Once the product becomes available through more channels the price will come down a bit at resellers, but so far I've only seen the official Adobe prices. Hopefully we'll know the education pricing soon too.

I don't get briefed about the marketing side of things, but I've been using LR 2 (not the public beta) as the core of my work for a while, and it's great. As with all software products it does have some annoyances (to me) that will get tweaked in subsequent patches, but none of them have been showstoppers for me.

VK4CP, there are no guarantees that the default colour rendering of your NEFs will match NX2 (what does "properly render" actually mean? ). But if you invest a little time calibrating it for your camera(s) you might be very happy with it.

... Obsolete ...

One thing that is really exciting me about LR2 is this

http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/DNG_Profiles

The main complaint about LR was the starting point for any image didn't look like it did in the camera. This feature should go some way (Not all the way unless Nikon releases the Calibration Profiles) to alleviating this issue.

I downloaded the Beta and had a look at the D2x Mode 1 Beta profile on some of my images and wow what a difference.
Localized corrections are well worth the 165 in my book.

DaveB wrote:Stubbsy, those prices you mentioned don't show up on the Adobe site.

They do for me: Adobe Online Store. Chose "Upgrade" and download: $165. Full version, download is $489. Make sure you are in the Australia store where we get to pay extra for absolutely nothing.

stubbsy wrote:I've been playing with the beta for some time and I'm quite impressed with the new features (did I mention local editing )

I played with the beta for a bit, but it had all the same bugs that I raised from 1.3. I have downloaded the trial of the new version and I can see that at least one bug has been fixed. With 1.3 and 2 Beta, if you displayed a picture that is stored on NTFS that was taken during DST, the time was out by an hour - and the reverse happened during DST displaying a file that was taken outside DST. I haven't had a chance to check the other bugs I raised.

ATJ wrote:Chose "Upgrade" and download: $165. Full version, download is $489. Make sure you are in the Australia store where we get to pay extra for absolutely nothing.

What a damn joke!! US$299 to download if you live in the US but we get slugged at approximately $174 extra to do the same thing here!! >:(

<slaps self on forehead> I wasn't looking at the download price...


ATJ if you find bugs in LR feel free to talk to me about them. If I can reproduce them in my environment I can log them with my own bugs in the Adobe internal systems. Maybe that would improve the turnaround for you (having bugs reported by different groups of users [e.g. end users, pre-release testers, etc] can improve the perceived priority of fixes).
NTFS-related bugs wouldn't come up in my environments (which are all OS X) but in general I'm interested in improving LR: it's the core of my own workflows at the moment.

I'm *not* volunteering to act as a general clearinghouse for LR bugs (I do have real work that needs to be done!) but I'm open to discussions of bugs/features.

VK4CP wrote:Capture NX still remains the only proper RAW converter for Nikon shooters.

Why do you say that? Have you tried the supplied camera profiles and the facility to profile your camera and find it wanting compared with Capture NX?

I toyed with trying to download from the US site but they ask for your email address and country (which has to be US/ Canada) and they already know my email adddress is in Australia. It might work if you're downloading for the first time to give your email address and claim to be in the US, though there would have to be an element of risk involved.

There's a video on Luminous Landscape on how to back up your existing catalogue before downloading version 2. I would have thought the automatic backup would do the trick but there must be more than that, maybe something equivalent to the infuriating tendency to lose actions you didn't explicitly save each time there is a new version of PS. However I haven't been able to run it as yet, it keeps crashing out of IE. Must be too much demand on their servers.

Murray Foote wrote:I toyed with trying to download from the US site but they ask for your email address and country (which has to be US/ Canada) and they already know my email adddress is in Australia. It might work if you're downloading for the first time to give your email address and claim to be in the US, though there would have to be an element of risk involved.

This won't work when it comes to pay for the upgrade. You need to supply a credit card to pay and unless you have a US based card you will be stuffed.

DaveB wrote:ATJ if you find bugs in LR feel free to talk to me about them. If I can reproduce them in my environment I can log them with my own bugs in the Adobe internal systems. Maybe that would improve the turnaround for you (having bugs reported by different groups of users [e.g. end users, pre-release testers, etc] can improve the perceived priority of fixes).
NTFS-related bugs wouldn't come up in my environments (which are all OS X) but in general I'm interested in improving LR: it's the core of my own workflows at the moment.

I'm *not* volunteering to act as a general clearinghouse for LR bugs (I do have real work that needs to be done!) but I'm open to discussions of bugs/features.

Thanks for volunteering, Dave.

This is my most recent one: Lightroom 1.3.1 won't read metadata from a jpg file which still exists in LR 1.4.1 and LR 2. In fact, it is a pretty poor one as it is a core function that appears to have never been tested.

This one appears to be partially fixed: Use Unique Names. At least now it doesn't overwrite files, but the choice of filenames is not correct.

A new one: Lightroom 1.3.1 doesn't treat negative altitude correctly

One I haven't tested in LR 2 yet: Backup on import

Here is a really, really DUMB bug in the Windows version. One wonders what the developers were thinking.

You can toggle opening/closing the panels using the Tab key.

Windows allows you to switch between open windows using Alt-Tab.

If you are on the LR2 Window and do Alt-Tab, it toggles the panels as well as switching windows.

<big sigh>

EDU pricing looks to be $150.70inc all thereabouts.

Like always Adobe Australia has jacked up prices... Ive seen the profit margins for the RET version.

Has anybody started working with LR2/Mogrify yet?

I downloaded it last night and plugged it in but I'm have some troubles.

I have replicated an export preset I had with LR 1 & LR/Mogrify. I have everything working except for the JPEG quality.

With LR 1 & LR/Mogrify, I would set File Settings to JPEG and Quality on 100. Then in LR/Mogrify I set the quality to 80. (I had to create the JPEG file first so that LR would check what files are already there and not overwrite them).

With LR 2 & LR2/Mogrify, there's no quality setting in the LR2/Mogrify Post-Process actions, so, in File Settings I set quality to 80 instead of 100. It produces a JPEG file which is twice the size of the one produced from LR 1. Even if I set the quality to 30, the output file is still larger.

Any ideas?

LR2 is good. Love local editing. Love the export to relative folders. Output sharpening good too, and there are other minor usability improvements all round.

Useful video tutorials here:

http://www.adobe.com/designcenter/video_workshop/

for those that have Lightroom 2 and a Smugmug account, check this out: http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies/smugmug/
used it last night, is very impressive!
there is also a Flickr add on: http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies/flickr/

The more I look at Lightroom 2, the more disappointed I get. Do the Adobe developers even bother to test their code? I keep finding more and more really simple bugs that the most basic unit testing would root out. It is likely they have taken no care and no pride in what they are doing.

Laurie wrote:for those that have Lightroom 2 and a Smugmug account, check this out: http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies/smugmug/
used it last night, is very impressive!
there is also a Flickr add on: http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies/flickr/

Agreed - you'll see some commentary about this and Timothy Ayres' mogrify plugin where I discuss my LR 1.3 workflow HERE. I think these two are essential plugins for either version of LR

And yet another problem...

I couldn't work out where all my disk space was going. I'd lost about 6GB in a week for no good reason. I went looking. I discovered nearly 6GB being used in the following directory:

C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\My Documents\My Pictures\Lightroom\Lightroom 2 Catalog-2 Previews.lrdata

LR2 had created 1:1 previews for all my images (>20k of them) without asking me. I then told it to delete all the previews, which it proceeded to do. This did not free up any disk space, even after I quit from LR2. I then deleted all the directories under the above directory and got my space back.

I started LR2 again and immediately I started seeing my disk space disappearing again. When I checked the directory LR2 was creating the previews again. I told it to discard them again, but the disk space kept disappearing and I was able to discard them all again.

At this point the only way I have worked out to stop LR2 creating the previews is not to run LR2.

... Obsolete ...

I don't mind LR2 except dual monitor usage isnt' working well for me, but I think it's more of a hardware issue than the program itself.

VK4CP wrote:ATJ, what about creating separate catalogues?
At least that way you can contain the previews it generates for your current job only.

Not worth the trouble at this point. LR 1.4.1 handles this (and other things) OK, so I'll stick with 1.4.1 until Adobe fix 2.

not sure about the windows version but under "catalog settings>file handling" on mac you can set it to discard 1:1 previews after "1 day", "1 week", "30 days", "never"
maybe it is set to "never" on your setup or you need to wait for at least a week of none activity on a file so its preview goes
again not sure if this will help
my preview file is 12.2G for 20,000 files so I need to wait a little longer till the file size drops as I have been looking through lots of files lately

firsty wrote:not sure about the windows version but under "catalog settings>file handling" on mac you can set it to discard 1:1 previews after "1 day", "1 week", "30 days", "never"
maybe it is set to "never" on your setup or you need to wait for at least a week of none activity on a file so its preview goes
again not sure if this will help
my preview file is 12.2G for 20,000 files so I need to wait a little longer till the file size drops as I have been looking through lots of files lately

It was set to "30 days", just like on 1.4.1 but I changed it to "1 day" but that didn't make any difference. My first issue is why it created them in the first place. With 1.4.1 it only creates them on import. I have not imported any images into LR 2, only migrated the catalog. My second issue is if I tell it to discard them (3 bloody times) why does it keep creating them again? That is either really poor programming or a level of arrogance (from the development team) that is beyond belief.