Zoom-in Online

It wasn't that long ago, that I was introduced to Lightroom — and blown away by it too, I might add. Today, Lightroom 2 hits the shelves with a ton of improvements and additions, ready to blow me away all over again.

At the very top of the list of new features, the new adjustment brushes really caught my attention. Where before, all editing was applied to the entire image, we can now dodge, burn and tone selectively within the photo. This is a huge improvement and one that will speed up my work immensely. Somewhat related to this is the new ability to add vignetting after cropping, which the original version lacked.

Generally, I only do a little work per image in Photoshop, since including Lightroom into my workflow. I would estimate that I am able to do 70% of all my needed post-processing in the old Lightroom (in itself quite amazing). With the new version, I expect that percentage to go even higher. But for those of you who like to do a lot of photoshopping, there is good news as well. The fact that you can now open images from Lightroom as smart objects is pretty cool, as well as the improvements for panorama stitching, HDR and then of course, if you do really heavy work requiring a lot of memory, the added support of 64-bit memory handling.

Lightroom 2 also supports multiple monitors. I only have one, but I've worked on two in the past and it really does add a lot to the work experience. As selling points go, multiple monitors is a nice addition.

Workflow is really one of the most important parts of post-processing, and for that even the original Lightroom rocked. With the new editing tools, there will be entire photo shoots that will never even be opened in Photoshop. For that alone, Lightroom 2 is well worth the relatively low upgrade price of just $99 (non-upgraders will have to pay $299, which is also a good price, considering the amazing tool that Lightroom is). In my opinion, Lightroom is the best piece of imaging software to come out since Photoshop started calling itself CS, and I can't wait to dive deeper into version 2.

You can read more about Lightroom 2 on Adobe's website. You might also want to check out Scott Kelby's rundown of new features, which is even more extensive than the official page.

Rasmus Rasmussen is on loan from iStockphoto, where he is part of the image inspection team.