Painless, amazingly.

My extensive tests with the free trial version of Lightroom 2 confirmed that the product is stable and debugged and I now find I cannot live without the localized adjustment features LR2 added. Not to mention enhanced keywording and search functions. Hopefully Adobe will add keystone/perspective correction in the next version and I will be able to bid a not-so-fond farewell to Photoshop CS2 (and its many predecessors), that user interface nightmare of a product.

Having had nothing but trouble upgrading Adobe products in the past I approached the idea of an online upgrade of Lightroom 1.4.1 to Lightroom 2 ($99) with trepidation.

Mercifully all went well.

Pay your $99 – assuming you have a version of LR1 on your computer – and off you go:

Download in progress – you have to elect either the Mac or Winblows version.

The new serial number is provided for input.

Old and new numbers input and she’s ready to go! I have blurred out the last four digits for security – you have twenty thousand guesses!

Even though I had the trial version already loaded, Adobe insisted on uploading the whole thing again – no big deal as it only took a minute or two.

My only complaint so far is that the auto-masking feature, when applied to large areas, is very sluggish. Now I must try the application on our old iMac G4 (PPC, 1.25gHz) and see how well it works on a relatively ancient machine.

If you do not have LR1 then LR2 will run you $299 – $100 more than Apple’s Aperture. Adobe has no earthly reason to drop the price to compete with Apple’s offering. If you elect the latter, be prepared to blow another $2-3,000 on a machine which might actually run it at something approaching reasonable speed. If you don’t believe me, stop by an Apple Store with your favorite RAW file and load it in Aperture on a MacBook. Then try the crop tool. Convinced?