With sincere apologies to Mr. Freidl, i'm having a hard time rationalizing spending $300 for Lightroom.
About a week ago, i downloaded a trial copy to try it out. i had been shooting a lot of raw images and wanted to see what sort if imagey magic i might be able to do with them. i tend to stay reasonably organized when dealing with images (even if i shoot a crapload of them) so the library wasn't really that interesting to me. Instead, i turned my attention to the "develop" function.
i dunno. For the most part, i was kinda unimpressed.
Mind you, i've been using Paint Shop Pro 8 (Photoshop's mutant clone created from some DNA samples scraped from a shower wall) and recently Gimp with UFRaw (which… well… let's just hope they're from the same general sector in space as Photoshop) to monkey with images, so i was kinda expecting a bit more. Most of what Lightroom really gives you is some of the stuff you could do in a Darkroom before images went digital. Along with not some stuff you could do. i've done my time in darkrooms, so i know what's possible. It's kinda weird.
i did learn a few things about histogram modifications i was able to use on some images, so it wasn't completely worthless, and i'm also damn sure that i don't fit the photo professional profile this was obviously targeted at. There are some features i'll miss in 20 days when the demo expires, but not enough to separate myself with three Benjamins. Mostly, i'll contend myself with taking what i've learned and using the bone saws and flint axes that i'm currently working with to do image corrections and enhancements.
Or maybe i'm just incredibly cheap.
For me, Lightroom made the difference between sometimes fixing a photo that was really off (white balance, framing, exposure, red eye, etc.) to tweaking every single photo and really improving the overall quality. It's so fast to do a quick crop or straighten or boost fill light or fix white balance, and I like that it doesn't alter the original and is so quickly reversible. Now maybe if I was better at getting things right when I snap the photo it wouldn't be as useful, but I wouldn't go without it now.
No need for apologies, JR, Lightroom is certainly not for everyone. I often recommend Picasa for friends with a snapshot camera who just want to organize and share their family/vacation pics, for example.
The key to understanding Lightroom is to realize that it is a photo workflow app first. Trying to shoehorn it into an existing, well-established workflow just to use it for its RAW conversion is pretty much guaranteed to underwhelm. It's the total package that makes photo workflow flow that is the killer, life-changing prospect of Lightroom and Aperture. But it's not for everyone, and there are certainly those who really give Lightroom a thorough testing yet decide that it's not for them.
As for me, I couldn't live without it, photographically speaking. I'm taking less photos (with more keepers) as I become a better photographer, but it's still completely normal for me to go for an hour's walk and come back with 400 shots, and I could never actually garner any benefit from doing so if I couldn't quickly, effectively, process the photos and learn from the experience. Lightroom made that possible for me.
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Adobe products almost all seem to have an amazing pricing / reality rift. It's to the point I won't bother even looking at them - Lightroom most recently - because of this.
That, and Acrobat is now what happens when you apply too many MBAs to a Good Thing. They have a lot to answer for.
However, they recently found the "target x86" compiler switch for Xcode and will finally be producing a modern Photoshop Elements for the Mac. At half price ($50), it's an acceptable value, too.