Adobe Responds to Aperture

Adobe has just released a public beta of Lightroom. Lightroom is a stand-alone program designed for organizing your photo library, optimizing images, creating slideshows, and printing the results. I've worked with the program for a few days and am rather impressed. It is very similar in concept to Apple's Aperture, but does not have the stringent hardware requirements (Aperture won't run on my dual 2GHz G5 with 4.5 GB of RAM... I'd need to purchase a new video card). The public beta if free and will expire in June. At the moment it is a Mac-only application, but it will eventually be available for Windows.

A few things I like about Lightroom when compared to Aperture:
• I can run it on just about any machine that can run OSX 10.4
• I can leave my images in their original folders on my hard drive instead of being forced to import them into a different file system
• It seems to be rather fast, even on average machines
• It has a simple and effective method for converting images to grayscale
• It allows me to tweak individual colors without making selections

If you want to find more info on the product, do a search on google for Lightroom and Shadowland (it's development code name).

Comments

[Ben Willmore]

It's all about creating the most efficient workflow for Photographers without having to be stuck with a lot of design decisions that were made with older programs. I'm 90000% glad they did not try to simply improve bridge... bridge will still be useful for many people, but Lightroom will allow photographers to save many hours of time that could not be saved by trying to fix bridge.

[Sally From The Valley]

Lightroom looks interesting, but I wonder why they just didn't incorporate these features into Bridge or Photoshop Album? Having Adobe push all three programs seems a bit redundant, no?

[Sally From The Valley]

Good point... but I'm a photographer and a graphic designer and Bridge just ain't cuttin' it for me. From the looks of things, Lightroom won't either, unfortunately. So I guess people like me are going to be stuck using multiple party programs in our workflow until either Bridge is improved or something better comes along.