Review by Bryan Newman

I have been a serious amateur photographer for some time with more knowledge than talent. I have used Photoshop a lot but never used a work flow package other than iPhoto, so despite understanding the concepts of workflow I have not had any practical experience using any tool like Lightroom. So out of the box this was a little intimidating to use.

Setup/installation - This worked great other than having to update my Mac OS to 10.9 to get it to install. Once the OS was up to date, the actual installation was very quick, just a few minutes.

Starting Use - Here things got a little hairier. Much like Photoshop, there are lots of options, likely many that an individual will never use. The tool icons are familiar, but took a while to get the gyst and some old digital images imported. Immediately the things I like are the ability to change the white balance of batched photos. I batched a series of images of Marmots and Ground Squirrels in Alaska and took them from worthless to perfect in no time (if you subtract the time it took me to figure out how to get them all batch selected and then converted.

HDR - I was also excited to see that HDR is built in. I have long played with Photomatix’s trial version but have been afraid to pull the trigger. Also, I have used the Photoshop plug in and this built in option is more like the plug in and less dynamic than Photomatix. Or at least with my current abilities. I can get it to make decent HDR images again testing with Alaskan images of glaciers, but I cannot get that unworldly look. Not sure if that is me, or not in the abilities of this software. But I was able to get highlights on the ice as well as details in underbrush so that is success.

Other things - It does look like there is a learning curve and I am still early in the process. I have many photos from over the years and hope to shoot some to start populating catalogs and seeing how this affects my work flow. I’m looking forward to trying more batch corrections and occasional clean up with the editing tools. From my brief playing, stuff like red eyes and little flaws in image or exposure are fairly quick to fix. I like the base tools on the right and it works as well if not faster than photoshop for me. Looking forward to additional exploration including Meta data etc.