New Lightroom-2 Beta-N (?) Overview

Adobe’s Julieanne Kost has three new overview demos (or tutorials if you prefer) that highlight the application’s new features (demo one, two and three). It’s a very concise, but good overview; Julieanne Kost is my favorite LR video-tutorial author - she always selects excellent examples, says what keyboard shortcuts she is using (since you cannot see it on the screen), and provides very articulate, meticulously-planned tutorials. This mini-series is no exception; for anyone interested in LR, watching it, is time well spent.

An interesting point to make is that the software she is demoing (LR Beta) differs in several, significant details from the official beta previously released by Adobe (i.e., the one I have - click on the thumbnail to see more detail).

One such area is the search bar (in demo one), which looks significantly tweaked (a time-line option has been added, and other options on the search bar renamed); similarly, the block of filters on the film strip has now a much sleeker, pop-up form, which can be invoked only when needed, and no longer just sits there confusingly, competing for attention wit the filter bar on top.

I also accidentally learned a few NEW useful keyboard shortcuts today: (from Juileanne Kost) pressing the letter H while making localized adjustments in the Develop module hides the “pins” on the image; in the develop module, when you click on the word EXPOSURE (or any other parameter in the BASIC panel), you can adjust numerical values by using +/- keys, and using , (comma or <) and . (period or >) keys cycles up and down through different parameters in the BASIC panel; and (from Ian Lyons on LR2-B forums) Opt (Mac)/Alt (Win) + 0 (zero) cycles through multiple keyword sets in the keyword panel of the library. It’s great to learn something new every day :).