Adobe Releases Lightroom 1.0

After an extensive beta testing period, Adobe has released Photoshop Lightroom 1.0. Lightroom is a professional imaging application aimed at photographers hoping to get a grasp on their photo sets and adjust picture attributes on a relatively large scale. If this sounds familiar to what Apple's Aperture can do; you're right. Lightroom is aimed at being an Aperture competitor.

Adobe Lightroom 1.0

Lightroom retails for 200 until April 30th, 2007, at which point it will go back to the standard price of 300. Like all upcoming Adobe products, Lightroom is a Universal Binary and works exceedingly well with Intel Macs. If you own a DSLR camera and shoot in RAW format, you might find the abilities of Lightroom alluring. Lightroom 1.0 makes complete use of Camera RAW 3.7 recently released by Adobe which gives it unparalleled compatibility with a variety of digital cameras.

Adobe Lightroom 1.0

Mikkel Aaland, the author of an upcoming Lightroom book, has some more reasons why you might want to use Lightroom over at the O'Reilly Digital Media blog. As for me, I have no use for Lightroom with my 3 year old Sony DSC-W1, which is only good for immediate Flickr uploading purposes.

Update: ArsTechnica has reviewed Lightroom.