It’s New Year’s eve and a lot of sites are putting up their obligatory “Look Back at 2007″ posts. In general, what I think you’ll find is most bloggers mentioning Adobe’s Photoshop Lightroom, and of course I’ll have to add to that. You’ll remember Lightroom was released earlier this year, but for alot of photographers and certainly myself, it seems longer than that. That’s because Lightroom was so easy to use, and such a natural fit into my workflow that it just seems like it’s always been there. Prior to Lightroom, my catalog of photographs was in shambles, completely and utterly unorganized. Worse, because of the time involved in bringing photographs into Photoshop, a large portion of photos were totally unedited, you know, exposures too dark, white balance off, and just a little drab looking. Enter Lightroom, now my photos are nicely keyworded, very organized, and consist of almost all “keepers”. A great many of them have been processed to some degree, friends and family get to see them, thanks to slideshow and web modules, and they’ve even been backed up– Lightroom told me to. In short, Lightroom has changed the way I work. I take more photos now, because they’re easier to manage. I look at more photos now, Lightroom makes it easy to see them. And most importantly, I have better photos. Lightroom’s develop module tools are so easy to use, and so intuitive, that it’s easy to turn drab into amazing, in no time. All that, and it’s completely non-destructive. I can’t wait for 2.0.
Of course alot of other products deserve props for their contributions in 2007. Adobe’s Photoshop CS3 of course was a potent weapon to add to the processing arsenal. I wonder how many more photographers are now doing panoramas now than the year before thanks to photomerge? On the camera front we had Canon and Nikon releasing their flagships, Canon with their EOS 1Ds Mark III and Nikon with their D3. Both cameras have recieved great reviews, and the overall consensus is they both have moved the standards much further ahead. For non pros, 2007 has been a field day. While we were late for it’s arrival the Canon 40d has quelled the desires of the countless pro-sumer type photographers previously probably shooting with the 30d. Sony released the A700, and judging by hits here, it’ll will be very popular. Olympus released a couple of good cameras, so did Panasonic, and of course Nikon did very well critically with the D300, having already won several “Camera of the Year” awards. If you were a camera consumer in 2007, there were a great many cameras to consume.
Finally, I just have to mention Scott Kelby. How many books can one guy write? I personally have several of them, and have always found them to be insightful, especially in the way he shares “what a pro would do” type tips. Even though I use Photoshop everyday at “my other job”, I always end up learning something from Scott’s books. But my point was, this guy is a book writing machine! I count 6 books for 2007! That’s just crazy. Keep in mind he’s doing this while traveling all over giving seminars on Lightroom and Photoshop and conducting photography workshops. To get the full gist, you have to check out his end of the year post in which he lists his many accomplishments this year–congrats to you Mr. Kelby, this was definitely your year.
-Patrick
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 1.0 Win/Mac
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