Lightroom is the photo “everything” solution for photographers.  As you can read anywhere, it is NOT a replacement for Photoshop.  I would go so far as to say it’s a very good replacement for Bridge, however.  Some will still hold that Bridge, Lightroom and Photoshop are a good trifecta, but honestly speaking I think Bridge is becoming, and will prove to be mostly redundant—unless you’ve been married to Bridge for more years than you can count, and at this stage honestly believe you can’t live without it.  Bridge is a file based version of Lightroom, minus myriad other things.

Lightroom is the best program on the market for a photographer.  This isn’t one of those programs you use to supplement or aid in your workflow, it is your workflow.  If you are an aspiring photographer new and or upcoming in digital photography; perhaps you’ve played around with Photoshop before, maybe even proficient in Photoshop, the biggest favor you can do for yourself/business is get Lightroom and learn every command it has.  Truth is, “anyone”taking a lot of photographs would realize the beauty and utility of Lightroom in a very short time.  The learning curve for Lightroom is 1/1000th of Photoshop, so don’t let anything hold you back.

As a working professional, I have amassed close to 30K images in the past 4 years.  I need an indexing program like Lightroom to help me search through this massive collection of images. Without a searchable index, I would probably tear my hair out hunting endlessly through my hard drives whenever I need to find a specific image for my friends, my family, or one of my clients in a timely manner.  When you think of Lightroom, think not only of a program that replaces Bridge, if you want it to, but does almost everything a Photographer needs Photoshop for, and also think of Lightroom as the coolest image DATABASE ever.

However, the program is more than just a fancy image database. Lightroom is a wonderful image organizer, it is also an incredible tool for image enhancement. Of all the image processing programs, Lightroom is the most elegant. Lightroom is a “non-destructive” image enhancer. In plain English, this means that you can never harm your original digital image! With Lightroom, photographers can experiment without fear because this program will never degrade or damage your files, Photoshop will.

So, there is much to tell, and much to know about Lightroom.  I will go into it with much fervor and more detail in the coming months.  For now, if you have not got a copy, download a free trial at Adobe Labs and give it a test drive.  This is one of those programs that once you have tried it, you won’t be able to live/work without it.