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Over the past year, I've upped my digital photography skills quite a bit. One of the tools I now find I can't live without is Adobe Lightroom. I've been running version 1.x for the better part of a year now, and am happy to announce that version 2.0 has just been released.

In case you are wondering what Lightroom is, or why you would want to use it over something like Photoshop, let me first say that I use both Lightroom and Photoshop CS3 for most of my post processing. I use Lightroom to "develop" my digital images (from RAW and jpg) and to catalog them. For organization, it's much better than Adobe Bridge. I also make lots of corrections in Lightroom such as straightening and cropping images, tonal adjustments, etc. All of those corrections are non-destructive, so you can always go back to the original image at the click of a button. Lightroom also has plugins for exporting directly to Flickr.

Lightroom 2.0 takes things up a notch by adding lots of heavily requested features such as:

• Local adjustment brush
• Enhanced organizational tools
• Volume management
• Extensible architecture
• Multiple monitor support
• Flexible print package functionality
• Streamlined Photoshop CS3 integration
• Enhanced output sharpening
• 64-bit support for Windows® and Mac OS

Of all these enhancements, Local Adjustments is probably the most important. In previous versions of Lightroom, all editing applied to the entire image. With local adjustments, you can now apply editing such as dodging and burning to selected parts of an image - something you could previously do only in Photoshop. This means that photographers will be able to spend more time in Lightroom for tasks that previously required Photoshop, which should help increase workflow productivity overall.

I tried Lightroom 2.0 during the beta, and now I'm really excited about upgrading from my current version.