My new favourite application

So I should probably be talking more about my New Zealand trip which was already a while ago, but instead I wanted to talk about the awesome-ness of Lightroom 3, a photo-editing application from Adobe.  We got off to a rocky start, Lightroom and I, when I discovered that I couldn't directly import my raw files from my camera, nor could I import raw files which were saved in iPhoto.

I still have to work out how to get around these flaws.

But since then I've been having a fun with it, I started off with just the standards, adjusting the white balance and exposure.  Then I discovered the vibrance and saturation levers and the highlighting.  I'm now going through a bit of an adjustment tool and vignetting phase.  Who knows what I'll discover next.

Just to give you some idea of the difference Lightroom makes, above is one of my favourite Lightroom edited photos so far, I think it feels like you're looking through a window at another world.  But below that one is what that shot looked like straight off the camera (so not even any white balance adjustments).  I'm not sure if it is such a big difference, and the shot is probably not that fantastic to start off with, but I think it looks a little better. 

Or the two below:

As you can see I have recently discovered vignetting (that's the black border around the photo, I literally only heard this word for the first time a few weeks ago).

In the below photo I've discovered the saturation and vibrance effects.  The cropping doesn't hurt either.

So what do you think, lightroom or no lightroom?  Or can you not tell the difference?

And I apologise if anyone accidentally found themselves here due to the very common blog title.  These are only very amateur shots which have been amateurly retouched.  For one thing I think the adjustment tool is meant to be used to touch up very small areas, for example the whites of your eye.  I instead use it on whole swathes of my shots. 

I think the next thing to investigate are layers.