I upgraded to Adobe Lightroom 2.0. The immediate good news is that it works fine with my .NEF files from my Nikon D700. Whew. And less than a week after the D700 hit the streets. That’s good timing. I wonder if that was planned.

Some initial impressions. The fit and finish look much improved. Stuff like the folder list loads asynchronously while the application loads and the new icons and ui widgets look better. It feels amazingly fast. I chose a picture of Chloe our Yorkshire Terrier to play with, mainly because I wanted to try out the new touch up tools on her eyes which were a bit under exposed. It worked great. So far I’m super happy with it. Easily worth the $99.00 upgrade.

The new plugin manager looks cool, though I ran into some awkwardness uninstalling the older plugins I already had, and installing the latest plugins for exporting to smugmug and flickr. I already had these installed in Lightroom 1.x and it got confused when I installed the new versions for Lightroom 2.0. I expect this is a one time awkwardness, though they could have included some kind of upgrade wizard or something for the plugins. One lame thing they need to fix is if you download a plugin and install it from the plugin manager (by clicking add), the plugin manager installs the plugin from where ever the plugin happens to be on your hard drive. This will typically be the Leopard Download folder or Desktop. So here’s what’s going to happen - people are going to install it from their desktop. At some point later they’ll clean up their desktop and delete the plugin (because it’s installed, right?). And then the plugin will obviously stop working and hilarity will ensue. The “Add” button in the plugin manager should copy it to a plugins directory - something like /Library/Application Support/Adobe/Lightroom/Plugins. Maybe have a wizard for installing plugins that asks you what to do, with copying it to this location as a default. I ended up making a “Adobe Lightroom Plugins” folder next to the application in the Application directory, just so I have a centralized location for them because I have the memory of a senile wombat. But now I have to copy the plugins into that directory before installing them into Lightroom, which really makes the process about as smooth as putting on ski-boots while wearing handcuffs. It should be one click and forget.

Here’s the picture of our cute little Chlo-ball I mentioned above. She weighs about three pounds and really has the sweetest temperament of our fur herd. She’s also the most athletic. She’s able to climb over barriers a giraffe would trip over. She jumps onto the couch from across the room, a little fur missle flying through the air, landing right on her favorite spot on the back of the couch. She’s like Michael Jordon dunking one handed from the free throw line. She has some serious hang time. She got game. She all up in yo grill, biznich.