Adobe Lightroom Software Beta - Press Release

[Photo-John]

Adobe Unveils Lightroom Public Beta and Delivers New Technology for Digital Photography Workflows

Professional Photographers Instrumental in Developing New Modular Software to Import, Manage, Develop, and Showcase Images

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Jan. 9, 2006 — Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today introduced the public beta of Adobe® Lightroom™, an all-new digital imaging solution for professional photographers. With its modular, task-based and streamlined environment, Lightroom's goal is to deliver a complete photography workflow. As Adobe collects more feedback from photographers, modules and feature sets will likely change, as customers decide on their popularity and priority within digital photography workflows. Initially available as a beta for Macintosh, Lightroom will later support both the Windows® and Macintosh platforms.

"We first showed an early version of Lightroom at the Adobe Ideas Conference in April 2005 to demonstrate a new streamlined digital photography experience, from capture to print," said Shantanu Narayen, president and chief operating officer of Adobe. "Today's Lightroom Beta leverages Adobe's renowned digital imaging innovation, in areas such as raw image processing, so that even in beta form photographers will find world class technology that complements Photoshop. We look forward to the feedback from the photography community as we refine the product over the next few months."

New Open Architecture Focuses on the Image
Lightroom Beta has been designed with a radical new user interface that puts the focus on what photographers really care about: the image. With just one click, the control panels and tools fade into the background in Lights-Out mode, allowing the image to take center stage. The innovative Identity Plate feature allows photographers to apply their own branding to the application and its output, so that it becomes their own personal gallery for showcasing work. Photographers also can rapidly scroll through hundreds of images and Quick One-to-One Zoom allows instant magnification of the finer points within the image.

"Lightroom defines the future workflow for the professional digital photographer," said Seth Resnick, a premier corporate, editorial and stock photographer. "It delivers exactly the functions photographers need to speed up their workflow in a way that was never before possible."

High-Quality Raw Processing
Leveraging industry-leading Adobe Camera Raw technology, Lightroom supports over 100 cameras and incorporates raw conversion into a single workflow experience. Adobe continues to advance the state of the art in raw processing, as evidenced by the new split-toning controls which create richer black and white images. This extends photographers' creative control, providing new parameters for making adjustments and more freedom to address precise areas of the photograph on the histogram. Upon import, files can be converted to Digital Negative format (DNG) or renamed and segmented by folder or date.

Images can also be showcased via slideshows with drop shadows, borders, Identity Plates and different colored backgrounds. The size and position of the images can be manipulated and delivered in Macromedia Flash®, Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) or HTML formats. A variety of templates are offered for contact sheets with the ability to add identity plates or produce a fine art print.

Pricing and Availability
The public debut of Lightroom Beta for Macintosh OSX 10.4.3 will occur at Macworld 2006 on January 10, 2006 in San Francisco at Booth #1307 and is available for free download from the Adobe Labs Web site at http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/lightroom . Recommended system requirements are Macintosh OSX 10.4.3, 1 GHz PowerPC G4 processor, 768 MB RAM and a 1024x768 resolution screen. Regular updates to the software will be posted on the site, feedback will be collected and the final product is expected to be introduced in late 2006. Further details around pricing, system requirements and availability have yet to be determined.

[masdog]

If I only had a Mac...

This looks very interesting, and I hope a PC public beta is soon to follow.

[Sebastian]

Been testing this since 9am, VERY cool program. I will do a serious test of it over the next few days, need to do a wedding edit. About 900 files, 50/50 JPG/RAW distribution. We'll see how it handles it. So far, this is 95% of what I need in my daily workflow.

Note to those who are wondering: Just like Aperture, this is NOT a Photoshop competitor, this is a program that aims to recreate the speed ease of use of a lightbox with digital images, while also integrating RAW conversion and color adjustments as well as printing functionality.

I am also strongly considering using this on an upcoming event shoot/sales session. The Adobe Lightroom logo can easily be replaced with your company logo/name for just that purpose.

Also, I should mention that this is not a knee-jerk reaction to Aperture, this has been in development since 2002.

[Photo-John]

I've been talking to kafin8ed, who's also been playing with Lightbox today. He says he's trying to compare it to Adobe Bridge, the browser built into Photoshop CS2. Have you done any comparing between the two? If so, got any comments? I'm guessing Lightbox was a project that Macromedia was working on when acquired by Adobe. I can see a lot of potential overlap between Bridge and Lightbox. I'm curious. And I wonder if this is Adobe's way to sort it out - make it public and see what the feedback is.

[kafin8ed]

These are my initial impressions: It takes one click to go to 100% and another to return, there's no switching between the hand and the magnifying glass- I like that a lot. I'm trying to see how much correlation there is between what I see in Bridge and what I see in lightbox, if I make a change in one do I see it in the other, that sort of thing. I can't really fathom wanting to use both of these apps in my workflow at the same time, it's either one or the other I think. I know Bridge is integrated into all the Adobe apps right now so it's not going anywhere - maybe it would be better if Lightbox was a plugin for Bridge or something like that. Lightbox's big advantage, from what I can see so far, is being able to edit RAW files without opening ARC, you just edit them in the window like you would a jpg. You can't tweak the curve manually like you can in ARC, that's a bummer. I don't see a way to crop in Lightbox either - I really like that feature in ARC/Bridge. Lightbox has a bunch of presets that are kinda cool - maybe kinda not, stuff like a one-touch button for sepia, cyanotype, direct positive, and antique B&W - I can't imagine real pros relying on these however. One big complaint about Aperture is its very high system requirements - lightbox is much more lenient in this respect, you don't need a $4000 machine to run it on. It seems fine on my Powerbook 1.67Ghz G4 with 1.5GB ram although injesting a handful of high res Tiffs took a minute or two - tiffs seem to be one of the slowest formats to work with in my experience however - RAW files were much faster to injest.

[Sebastian]

I agree, a way to crop would be great. Just a frame that overlays the image, so when you export you get only the selected area. Hopefully they will add that soon.

I can't compare it to Bridge since I don't use CS2, but I don't want PS integration. As far as I'm concerned, I don't care if I ever have to go into PS, I just need to be able to choose, adjust, crop, caption and submit my images. The printing functionality is nice, but I doubt I would use it much. All the color controls are here, they are non-destructive, and they are right where I need them.

I will post more once I go through an actual project with it.

[Sebastian]

I'm guessing Lightbox was a project that Macromedia was working on when acquired by Adobe.

No, it was started by a guy that left the Photoshop dev team, read more about it here:

http://photoshopnews.com/2006/01/09/...lopment-story/

[Sebastian]

Another sweet feature...

When in the Library mode, there is a little box superimposed over the preview. Clicking and dragging that box changes the grid view to a 100% preview mode, making it very transparent when checking sharpness. You are zooming in 100%, and switching to the "hand" mode all with one click. And upon release you are right back where you left off. I use this in full-screen mode, I mouse over to the right edge to unhide the preview pane, and make the rest of the screen the 100% preview. Attached is a screenshot.

[kafin8ed]

Yes, that is a very cool feature, I like the zoom the most. It appears as though cropping is done under PRINT.. Do you know if the changes get saved to an XMP file so they'll get applied to the RAW any time it's opened by a DAM that supports XMP?

[Sebastian]

I was going to post that cropping can be done in Print, but it can't. It's really imprecise as it tries to fit the image to the template. So if you found some way to get really precise crops using it, please share.

[kafin8ed]

I guess I'm wrong, the cropping feature appears to be more retarded than I thought. That's quite silly considering how long the cropping tool has been implemented in PS.

[Sebastian]

I guess I'm wrong, the cropping feature appears to be more retarded than I thought. That's quite silly considering how long the cropping tool has been implemented in PS.

Agreed.

I posted about it on the Adobe Dev forums, turns out cropping and versioning are both high on their list for the next beta release. I would also like to see a flexible rotation/match horizon tool.

Versioning, for those who aren't familiar with it, is the concept of storing one file, but having the software store several different sets of settings for it. This allows you to show a client several different versions without actually storing several different versions. I guess it should also be mentioned that Lightroom and Aperture both are a new breed of software that make adjustments to files without ever actually making changes to the original files. Settings that you apply are stored in a database and are only applied when working with the image. So your originals never face a threat from accidental overwriting.