Adobe Releases Lightroom beta for Windows

By Robert • July 20, 2006

Photoshop World Yesterday at Photoshop World in Singapore, Adobe announced that the Windows beta version of Lightroom(TM) had just been posted on the Adobe Labs website. At the conference, Ton Frederiks (Senior Application Engineer Adobe Systems Benelux, Holland) spent about one hour showcasing Lightroom. It is clear that Lightroom is aimed at heading off Apple’s Aperture; already making inroads with Mac users.

Robert was impressed! Lightroom gives us a hint of what we might see when Photoshop v10 is released. It has a totally different architecture than other Adobe products. The standard top menu bar has been replaced with snazzy right and left sidebars with collapsing menus and slick sliders.

The ‘black tie’ color scheme seems to be the new trend in commercial software. The are many enhancements and additions compared to the Adobe Camera Raw plugin (ACR). For example, the usability of the curves adjustment has been greatly improved through the addition of luminance and compression sliders. A cool ‘lights off’ feature dims everything but the preview window. Also, grayscale conversion has new colorizing options. And if I heard correctly, history states are saved with the file.

Of course, the raw conversion engine will ultimately determine the success of Lightroom. Adobe has already announced that they will use the recently aquired Pixmantec conversion technology in Lightroom.

At the conference, Adobe was pushing their ‘digital negative’ raw format (DNG) as a solution to the ever growing list of proprietary raw formats. The rest of the conference could have titled, ‘Photoshop Tips and Tricks’. Ton Frederiks and Marianne Young (Solutions Engineer Adobe Systems, South East Asia) showed intermediate and advanced techniques for getting the most out of Photoshop. While Photoshop is the ‘killer app’ for professional photographers and graphic designers, it can be perplexing to even skilled users. Towards the end of day, Ton Frederiks got lost in a myriad of layer stacks, alpha channels, and masks. I don’t feel so bad anymore!

Reference Link
Adobe Lightroom at Amazon.com

ADOBE Photoshop Lightroom 2.0 for WIN/MAC EDU