This morning, my newsreader floweth over(eth) with news about the new release of Lightroom from Adobe. There’s been a ton of expectation and hype concerning an impending v1.1 release, and last night, after a slight stumble by Adobe, it was released. To put a number to the hype, typically I get half a dozen or ten newsfed articles a morning. iPhonemania has increased that to about 15 each morning. This morning, I had 37. Yeah, the cacophony is reaching fever pitch!

I bought Lightroom when they still had the prices discounted by a C-note, and have been reading a bunch about it on the web, as well as trying to paw through Scott Kelby’s new book on it. (Which, BTW, may be somewhat obsolete now if the feature set of v1.1 is as improved as it’s being described.) So far though, I just haven’t found the niche for this product in my workflow.

For me, the cataloging aspect is the biggest thing LR brings to the table. I have a horrible time finding a specific image amongst 50,000+ images in my archive, and it appears that with enough care and feeding, Lightroom will helping with that. That alone is worth the price of entry.

I also hear things that lead me to believe that many photographers are using LR as a rough editing tool, and only going into Photoshop when there’s something tough or unusual that needs to be handled. Unfortunately, I haven’t really had the time to spend on trying this. With my crunch for the show, I’ve been working with what I know, and that’s Photoshop.

However, if the new version of LR really is that much more improved, maybe after July 9th (the hanging day for the show), I’ll be able to spend some time trying to get that paradigm shift pulled into my world.