Adobe® Photoshop® Lightroom® 2 for Digital Photographers Only

Chapter 6. LOCAL CONTROLS AND MORE IN THE DEVELOP MODULE

Figure 6.1. 6-1

Overall adjustments are always a core part of "developing" a photograph, which Develop has done very nicely since the first version of Lightroom. Yet this does not give a true photographic experience based on the traditional darkroom. For that, you need local controls, adjustments that affect one part of the image and not others.

While Lightroom 1 had a few very limited local controls, Lightroom 2 changes that completely. After working with it for a while, I really feel like I have regained long-lost darkroom controls, as shown in figure 6-1. The wonderful control that photographers such as Ansel Adams and W. Eugene Smith had over the black-and-white image was never fully realized in the color darkroom. This was one reason Adams gave for never liking color photography (and why the only book of his color work came out only after he died).

Sure, you could do a lot of work in Photoshop, but local controls were neither simple nor easy for most of us. Lightroom 2 totally changes this. I believe that the program may even change the way photographers approach color photography. This chapter covers the new local controls as well as additional distinctive features beyond what you saw in Chapter 5 that can really help you get ...