Lightroom does some things that are very useful in a processing routine, even if you do a lot of your processing (such as retouching, using filters, making composites, or correcting perspective) in another image editing program. First of all, you can continue to do processing in Lightroom even after you’ve sent the image from Lightroom to Photoshop (something I often do, BTW, with panoramas or HDR images). The advantage in doing as much processing as possible in Lightroom is that it’s very fast and you can instantly go back to any point in the history of what you’ve done by simply clicking on that step. But on top of that, you can do that fast and non-destructive editing on the result that comes from using any of the Photoshop techniques for combining images. Hot stuff. You won’t believe how hot until you’ve tried it a bit.

Now here’s something I just “discovered” today that makes it even better. Even if you don’t have two monitors, you can have Lightroom 2.0 create a second screen that shows the before and after result (or results) of what you’ve done. So you can very easily see exactly what the progression has been. You see, Lightroom 2.0 not only has the same Compare and Survey modes as 1.4, but you can set the second window (usually, but not necessarily, shown on a second monitor) to show the Survey mode while your main Lightroom workspace screen is in Develop mode. So you make the changes you want to make in Photoshop, save the result as a .TIF file, and then, in the Filmstrip, select both the original RAW file and the saved .TIF file, in that order. Then go to the Develop module while the original and the copy are still selected, make the Photoshopped copy your primary selection by Cmnd/Ctrl clicking it, and then click the button for the second screen. The button for the second screen is the second icon from the left in the Filmstrip toolbar. You’ll see the “Photoshopped” image to the right of the original image.

In the example shown below, I used Photoshop to correct perspective by using the Free Transform command. Then I wanted to do some further processing in Lightroom. I used a localized Exposure brush to “vignette” the corners of the image. Then I clicked the #2 Screen button so I could see the two images side by side full screen while I was still in the Develop module. What a difference!...but I decided at that point that I could make it even better by using the Clarity and Vibrance sliders to give the image a bit more pop. So I turned off the second screen (you wouldn’t have to do that if you had two monitors. Donations are gladly accepted) and clicked the #2 button again. What I saw was what you see below.

Here’s another image I made in Granada, Nicaragua the other day. I was shooting with my trusty Olympus SP350 point and shoot, which I can carry in my pocket—yet it still shoots an 8 MP RAW file. Limiting depth-of-field can be a real challenge though, thanks to the very short focal-length of the lens. So a side-trip to Photoshop Elements 6 made it easy to select the background with the Magic Selection Brush, feather the selection, and then do a Gaussian blur on the contents of the selection. Then I used a Levels Adjustment Layer to pop the image a bit. Took all of 30 seconds. Then I brought it back into Lightroom, darkened the corners and a lot of the distant background with localized correction brushes and gave the guitar and marimba a bit more snap with a Clarity brush. I could bounce back and forth between the 2nd screen and the Development module until I got exactly the finished look I wanted.