What to do AFTER you take the picture.

Obviously a big part of digital photography is what you do after the picture has been taken.  There are many image editing tools, storage tools, print tools and slideshow tools out there.  I have looked around and found what I like to think is the best tool for a digital photographer.

Adobe Lightroom.

Lightroom is a fantastic workflow based image processing tool for Windows and Mac.  It had many, many features... too many for me to list, but I will talk a little bit about it.

First, Lightroom makes getting the pictures off your camera a snap (pardon the pun).  It will import directly from your camera, from an existing picture collection, or from a memory card.  When importing you can apply effects, add exif data and much more.  It also does a great job presenting all your photos to you in a camera roll style display.  It even has a terrific 2nd monitor support that displays full sized images while you work with the roll on your main screen.

Lightroom allows you to 'develop' your pictures after importing, this may be as simple as fixing red-eye, or cropping out the fat guy with manboobs that photo-bombed your beach shot.  It also has a very large collection of filters and effects that can take an ordinary looking garden shot and turn it in to a work of art.

Lightroom will help you through setting up your pictures for printing, either with your own printer or a print shop.  No more dicking about at the instant photo kiosk, have it all ready at home, and just print when ready.

The software also has a large plug-in set.  This allows you to expand the software with third party effects and tools, I found the facebook and flickr plugins to be pretty cool.. They allow you to publish your photos to these social services with the click of a button.  It will even place a watermark or copyright notice on the photo as it does this.

All in all, I am very happy with Lightroom.  It is a real help to someone like me who just wants to fix up some photos before printing.  I don't need the heavy toolset that Adobe Photoshop provides, lightroom does what the photographer needs to do, and it does it quickly and intuitively.

Till next time, keep shooting.