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.
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.
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.
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If adobe releases to windows, I’m definitely going to get one of those!!
@daniel – it was also released for Windows.
i’m feel’n the pain on the older camera. hold that head up high, secure in the knowledge that your purchase earned you some early-adopted cred.
Apart from a nifty looking interface; what is new/different about this?
I know its a bit cynical, the paint to photoshop divide has a huge number of products all trying to absorb that space. Is $200-300 really worth it when some solutions go for much less (GIMP = Free)?
@Andrew – you really, truly cannot compare GIMP and Lightroom/Aperture. Yes, you can compare Photoshop with GIMP but not Lightroom, it is a completely different beast. I encourage you to try the 30 day trial for yourself. I’ve only used the beta months ago, so I wouldn’t be the best person to tell you more about it.
Totally unrelated to the post, but it was nice to see your feedburner stats jump from mid 2K to upper 3K.. Way to go mate.
Thanks Sumeet!
just a headsup. lightroom ships for 118€ education store. ill buy it.
the soft looks pretty simple for non-adobe experienced guys like me.
how user-friendly is the apple’s apperture soft compared to this one?
First time I hear about this it is necessary to try!
Yep I’m getting this for sure.
its courteous too .)
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mmike/396915440/
Then again, some photographers insist on publishing images without any software-processing at all…
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