Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I've been using Lightroom since the 1.0 betas were out, and I've seen the software grow over that time. LR 3.0 was the breakout version, practically demanding photographers to buy it. LR 4.0 brought to the table around 90% of the things you'd need Photoshop for. Lightroom 5 offers some minor improvements over Lightroom 4 that offer some valuable tools but might not be a justifiable upgrade for some. Photography is my hobby, and I got used to just throwing photos in folders and uploading them in a haphazard fashion. Lightroom brought to the table a discipline regarding my own workflow, so when I take my photos, I import them into Lightroom and control the entire process from input to export - whether it's to Smugmug (or another service), to print or to PDF/books. If you're new to Lightroom, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, despite the name, isn't Photoshop. It does photographic editing, but the program is a DAM - a digital asset manager. All of your photos are edited non-destructively and you can always revert to any step in the process. Lightroom is a powerful library, so you can organize your photos into collections, virtual collections and catalog/keyword/rank your photos as you wish. I can easily add geolocation information to my photos (either from a GPS or drop/drag on a map.) The software supports tons of camera RAW formats along with JPG and TIFF. I can take my photos, edit them, and export them to a slideshow, to the web, to a photo hosting site like Flickr or Smugmug, upload them to Facebook, or even create a book to be published. I can even make a video out of my photos. Lightroom over the years has saved me countless hours editing photos by allowing me to batch edit photos. Before, if I had sensor dust or "junk" on my lens, I'd get frustrated because there's no way I'm going to edit several hundred photos and fix it in all of them. Now, it's a few minutes to clean them all. Lightroom 5 offers a few features, some of which you may or may not use. The most impressive to me is the use of Smart Previews, which allows you to "edit" photos while they're offline. This would be probably the best laptop users, who'd need to do edits on photos that are on external drives that are not plugged in or available. Selective adjustment is quite nice. In previous versions of Lightroom, it felt like I was trying to do surgery on my photos using a chainsaw. Now, it's with a scalpel. Noise reduction and lens correction have been improved upon, and I can improve tilted images and make them look stunning. For someone who loves taking photos of architecture, it's put my photos on another level. I haven't noticed any performance slowdowns or increases over Lightroom 4. For Windows users running Windows 7/8 32bit, you're going to be frustrated because Lightroom loves to eat up memory. On my Mac - not really a problem. Would I recommend Lightroom to any digital SLR user? Wholeheartedly - but there's a caveat: Lightroom requires learning to get the full potential out of it. I'd recommend the Luminous Landscape series of Lightroom videos along with a good book (Scott Kelby is my preference) to go through. It took me a while to learn to get organized and learn how to use Lightroom. If you have Lightroom 3 or below, this is a worthwhile upgrade. As for Lightroom 4 users - the upgrade is decent but it's almost tempting to skip this and wait for the next Lightroom release - but still a great purchase. I do highly recommend watching Adobe TV videos about Lightroom to learn best practices and other tips. Sure, Lightroom is daunting, especially if you're new to photo editing/digital asset management, but learning the software will bring in massive benefits - whether photography is your livelihood or hobby.