By Dave Girard
August 19, 2008 - 11:30PM CT

Adobe steps up - Adobe Lightroom 2 box About a year and a half ago, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 1.0 launched to a fairly positive reception, especially given the shortcomings in its main competitor, Apple's Aperture.

But now that Apple has addressed many of the major problems with Aperture, Lightroom now faces some stiff competition in the RAW workflow arena. The recent release of Lightroom 2.0 is Adobe's attempt to strike back at Aperture 2.0, and we've taken a close look at the new release to see just much it advances Adobe's game.

While some of the new things in 2.0 are tweaks that you'd expect in a second-revision product, Lightroom also supports some significant additions that aim to raise the feature bar for RAW image processing. The much-touted localized adjustments feature, which attempts to bring some Photoshop-level control to RAW image processing, is headlining this release's feature set.

Lossless RAW image editing is a bit of a holy grail for digital image processing, so the more granular control we're given over RAW images, the closer we'll be to that digital imaging grail. But Lightroom 2.0 isn't just about localized edits—there are a lot of other additions that warrant a closer look.