Almost a month before any of us expected it, Adobe has released the much anticipated Photoshop Lightroom 2.0. For those of us who have been using the public beta, there are a number of very cool new features in the final release. If you haven’t been using the public beta, then oh man, are you in for a treat if you decide to upgrade.

Here is my list of things that make Lightroom 2.0 simply awesome, and I will point out changes from the public beta for those of you who have been using it for a while.

• Adjustment Brush
  Called the retouching tool in the public beta this originally was going to be a tool to add selective dodging and burning to an image, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. You have brush-type control to “paint” in exposure, brightness, contrast, saturation, clarity, sharpness, color, and there is a new soften skin option as well. This is one amazing tool that actually puts Lightroom ahead of Photoshop in terms of ease of retouching images.

Clarity Control
You can now use negative values in the clarity control, you can get some really cool effects with this, especially since you can use negative numbers for clarity in the Adjustment Brush.

Gradient Filter
This is a software version of a gradient neutral density filter but is totally controllable. If you are shooting a landscape and need to tone down the sky this is a perfect tool. There is no doubt you will find lots of other uses for this really cool new tool.

Vignette Control
In Lightroom 1.x the Vignette tool was designed to solve problems with certain lenses and filters but people wanted to use it for more creative adjustments. In the beta of 2.0 they added a post-crop vignette that great improved the vignette options, the problem was it was pretty easy to tell a picture that has been subjected to the post-crop vignette tool. In the final release of 2.0 the post-crop vignette tool now gets a roundness control and a feather control, these help you adjust the vignette to make it blend in much more naturally into the image.

Multiple Monitor Support
If you use multiple monitors, Lightroom 2.0 has some really nice multiple monitor support. This can not only help you when using Lightroom for your workflow but is very cool when showing images to a client.

Slideshow Improvements
One of my big complaints about the slideshow tool was that it would simply start on the first images and go forever. In Lightroom 2.0 you can now have opening and closing title pages, start the slideshow on the first title page and hit spacebar to stop it. When you are ready to continue, hit spacebar to begin the sequence. There is also a new checkbox to turn off the looping of the slideshow.

Camera Profiles
I have yet to play with this one, but a lot of people would click on the image in Lightroom and see an image they thought was really nice and them BAM! it would lose some level of saturation or sharpness, this happens because the first image you see is the embedded JPEG preview and then Lightroom switches over to the RAW file after it finishes loading. Adobe has added Camera Profiles so you can get that JPEG look right at the beginning and hopefully have to less corrections.

• http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshoplightroom/
  Price: Lightroom 2 is $299 or available as a $99 upgrade for Lightroom 1 customers.
• 30 Day Trial Available

Watch for a slew of new videos here showing off all of these amazing new features.

Camera Raw 4.5
Camera Raw for Photoshop CS3 has been updated to version 4.5.  It will provide exactly the same rendering obtained in Lightroom 2 but will not have all of the new controls provided in Lightroom 2.   Download Camera Raw 4.5 and DNG Converter 4.5 (Mac, Win)