Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 was launched officially in July. You should be able to get final versions as you read this. After working with it through Adobe’s development process, I think the new version may change the way photographers deal with color images. Lightroom 1.0 was widely regarded as a solid tool for organization and some elementary manipulation or enhancement of images.

I’m a photographer with a deep, dark secret: I’m color-blind. For those of you without this particular affliction, allow me to clar-ify something. It doesn’t mean that I see the world in black-and-white; it just means that I see things a little bit differently. I see colors, and as far as I know, I see all the colors that anybody else does.

It’s no secret that the medium-format industry has experienced dramatic changes since the advent of digital. Open camera systems (think Hasselblad’s H2 series) became closed, leaving players such as Phase One and Leaf no access to Hasselblad’s systems. Additionally, the disappearance of beloved medium-format models signified harsh times in the sector as Contax, Bronica and Pentax fell by the wayside.
 

In the beginning of photography, most people were unaware or oblivious to noise, but with higher-ISO films, image grain became an issue; I look upon grain as a form of image noise. Grain occurs from film’s granular structure and appears throughout an image, but most notably within the darker and higher-contrast areas. Understanding is important for the next stage of photography—digital!