Retouching Photos With Lightroom’s Brush Tool

Lightroom’s brush is an awesome tool that can be used to add stunning visual effects to your composition. Use the brush tool to blur out skyscapes, enrich or change color tones of individual objects, overcome backlighting and much more. The video below explores several techniques for changing the exposure, softening the skin and altering the color characteristics of a single person.

Software So Good You Can Feel It Through Your Eyes

I’m deeply appreciative when I use software that continually simplifies complex tasks. Lightroom is one such application and deserves huge props for much of its user experience. This software gets me. I feel like I’m communing with it on a much deeper, but more natural level. When I use it the visual feedback provides so much context that I can literally feel my way around, as if I’m holding something physical in my hand. Here’s a short example:

That’s pretty powerful stuff. Now if only I could get the same experience when using a development IDE–I’m talking to you Eclipse; you big, nasty brute with a face only a mother nerd could love.

Lightroom 2 Beta – First Whiff

Lots of Adobe news lately and this time it’s the announcement of the Lightroom 2 public Beta available on Adobe Labs.

The first item to make an impact with me was the ‘getting started’ wizard you’re greeted by the first time you launch the application. Aimed at IUE (Initial User Experience), the getting started wizard is nothing new, but Adobe’s added a wrinkle — as you click through the wizard various elements described in the wizard are highlighted in the actual interface. It’s common to see lots of videos and written guides thrown at the user, so it’s nice to see the wizard be actually integrated within the projects. As a user I feel much more connected to the software and there’s no disjointing experience of having to switch between apps to view the IUE information.

Tight hooks into the application in order to provide IUE is something that Adobe’s latest efforts have put a lot of work into. Photoshop CS3 provides a ‘workspace’ which highlights elements that are new with the application as you work in it.

The other thing that jumped out at me was the location of the tools when in the ‘Develop’ module.

It’s way too late for me to stay up and play more, but John Nack gives the full run down on what’s new and improved.