I recently picked up a copy of Lightroom 2 thanks to the new Beta profiles which put the image quality just about on par with Canon’s DPP. This combined with the neat workflow tools and the exceptional RAW level image manipulaton made LR2 too tempting to resist. However, recent exploration of the program has found an early problem. So far, it seems that the resizing of images out of development mode suffer from a poor quality resizing mechanism, leaving your images full of ugly artifacts. In fact, the well received *free* Faststone resizer handily beats down the $300 Lightroom 2 in resizing! Strange, but true. Below are the examples to prove it.

These images all had the exact same settings coming out of Lightroom 2. All were resized to 900×600 with no output sharpening, except for the images that went to Faststone resizer. These were exported from Lightroom 2 full size jpeg and resized to 900×600 in Faststone resizer using their highest quality algorithm. Please click the images for the full size view.

It’s very clear in this image how much more smooth the Faststone hawk is. Note how the head and feathers in the Lightroom 2 version look more rough, like a cheap digital camera.

Another example, this time using a forest scene. Same settings, same methods:

Notice how awful the trees look in the Lightroom 2 resize. There is something very wrong with the resizing algorithm in Lightroom 2. You can sometimes see these poor quality artifacts in the develop previews inside the program itself, especially on non full screen images.

If the free Faststone resizer can get it right, why can’t a $300 professional image program like Lightroom 2? There are many more examples of these sorts of artifiacts in LR2 resizing. At this point I can only recommend you use Faststone for your resizing needs. LR2 simply doesn’t cut it.

You can check out Faststone for yourself here.