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In last week's blog I was looking over the fence at Apple's Aperture 2.0 and noted that it might give us a glimpse of things to come with Lightroom - and well, it did. The good news is that Lightroom Beta 2.0 has arrived and it has gone a few steps past where Aperture 2.0 left off. Even though it is not a final shipping version it is great to see that the Lightroom engineers have figured out how to make local corrections like dodging and burning, clarity, saturation, exposure and brightness a non-destructive feature! And that is a huge advantage.

Hence this week I thought I would present five of my favorite new features that I really like in Lightroom 2 Beta - features that I am sure will only get better by the time we get to the final version of Lightroom 2. So here goes...

Local Adjustments
Well, first off are the new localized adjustments. And I think everyone would agree that this is going to really be an incredible asset. In comparison, Lightroom 1.3.1 is already looking passé.

And in light of George Mann's wonderful post (gotta love those little turtles) I'll go a little deeper and give a cursory glance at how the new tool works. I'll say right off the bat that the new local correction tools are a bit confusing at first. It took me a few minutes to figure out exactly what is going on and for all of us it will take some time to work with the tools so we can utilize them fully. The good news is that once you play with them for a bit they are really quite easy to use.

At right you'll see the image I was working on. I wanted to bring out more detail in the model's hair using the dodge and burn and exposure tools. First off, here is a before and after image - the top is the before image and the bottom is the after image. In the after image you'll notice that there is significantly more detail in her hair and you'll also notice that her face and the surrounding areas are not affected by the local corrections I have made on her hair. So how does this work?

To start off with you have to make a mask over an area you'd like to work on. As soon as you click the brush in the right panel go to your image. You'll see a target type tool and the trick is to choose a part of your image that you want to work on. Before painting the mask, choose your brush size by clicking on the bracket keys: ] = bigger, [ = smaller. Then, click on that part of the image, hold down the mouse and start to paint over the image where you want to make adjustments. At this point don't worry about drawing outside the lines too much with your mask; we can erase parts of the mask afterwards.

If you have Auto-Mask checked then Lightroom will help out by only working with similar colors to your original point and it will also try to detect edges. In my example the hair was difficult for Lightroom to detect edges on so I had to go back in and erase parts of the mask. To do this I just went and clicked on Erase in the upper right hand corner of the brush palette, chose my brush size and went to work. If you change the brightness so it is quite visible you can see exactly how you are erasing and where the edges are.

Once you have your mask it is easy enough to adjust the sliders in the Edit box that drops down when you create a mask. That is pretty much it. You can make as many local corrections as you want. And yes, this is the quick and dirty guide to using the brush for localized corrections. But I am guessing many of you can figure out the finer points of these new tools by playing with them.

Here are a few extra tips for making masks and seeing just where they are. If you want to see what your mask looks like (before any erasures) just mouse over the target dot as in the top image at right. If you want to see exactly which areas you are affecting with your mask then use the tint dialog and change the color to something bright like red as in the bottom image at right. Here you can see quite clearly how I have customized the mask to affect just the hair. It also edges onto her face in several places and I can correct that by doing a bit more erasing.

New Edit in Photoshop Features
With Lightroom 2 Beta one can now open any image or set of images straight into Photoshop with the capability to run HDR or the fantastic panorama Photo Merge option. One can also open an image as layers in Photoshop or as a smart object.

In the past I have really wanted to work up a series of images to build a panorama straight from Lightroom. Because Photoshop's Photo Merge tool works so well it is a snap to build incredible panoramas with very little effort. And now with this integration in Lightroom every other similar application out there (e.g. Aperture) is going to be hard pressed to match the integration that Lightroom has with Photoshop.

64-Bit Support
For those with large catalogs and high resolution raw files the ability to tap into 64-bit processing will make Lightroom a bit snappier - and though I haven't tested it yet it might even make large catalogs with 15,000 plus high resolution files a reality. You can bet I'll be testing this out when we get closer to a final version. Of course for 64-bit support to make a difference, on Mac you first have to be running Leopard (OSX 10.5) and you'll need more than 4 GB of RAM as well. On PC you'll have to download the 64-bit version of Lightroom and be running Vista 64.

Finally, Output sharpening in the Web Module
I know this feature has not really been touted by many online but for a complete workflow this a KEY feature that Lightroom has been missing - until now. Kudos to the folks at Adobe for adding this feature. The web sharpening feature is located in the Output Settings box and has the same type controls as in the version 1.3's Print Module. Super easy to use and very functional.

Smart Collections

The new smart collections feature will come in handy quite often I think. It isn't hard to figure out that having a folder with all of your 5 star images collected together will help when putting together a portfolio. Another example is when making submissions to clients I can just make a smart folder with the pertinent keywords and then create a web gallery for the client to look at in just a few minutes from that smart collection. Pretty slick!

Lastly - just a note, the toolbar has not been moved as many folks online have stated. The toolbar is just as it was in Lightroom 1.3 save for the fact that the crop, red eye, cloning and healing tools and the new local corrections (i.e. brushes) have been moved to the top of the right hand panel. Otherwise the toolbar is right where you expect to find it and it still has all of your favorite options.

That's it for this session. See you next week.

Adios, Michael Clark