Adobe Release Lightroom Beta for Windows

Windows users finally get a chance to try out Adobe Lightroom

Adobe has released a Windows version of its Lightroom application for testers to try out. Lightroom is a new photo-editing tool for professional photographers out there to help manage the workflow from initial shooting to finished product.

While recent Adobe programs/modules have such as Adobe Bridge and Camera Raw have helped to alleviate some of the challenges facing photographers in efficiently managing digital images, Lightroom is a full-featured product that aims to apply the lessons learned with those products into a more feature-filled a photographer-oriented package. Adobe Lightroom is also modular in design and Adobe will release an SDK to allow 3rd party developers to release their own modules for the application to extend functionality:

The concept behind Lightroom is to provide a single environment that has all of the functions photographers most commonly need to perform on their images. But we’re not interested in trying to pack all the knobs and switches into Lightroom that a photographer might ever need. The goal of Lightroom is to have the RIGHT knobs and switches, in the cleanest, least cluttered, easiest to use package. It’s not about having every tool in the hardware store. It’s about having a focused set of features that are just right for photography, are intuitive, powerful, and easy to learn. So yes, it’s an image editing tool, and it’s a workflow productivity tool.

The Adobe Lightroom beta had been previously released for the Mac OS X platform and as such is slightly ahead of the Windows version. Adobe points to recent developments in the Windows Vista operating system for the later release of the Windows beta and states that the shipping version of Adobe Lightroom for Mac OS X and Windows will be within months of each other.

For those that want to take a stab at the beta software, you can head over to Adobe Labs to download it. This Beta 3 version will expire on January 30, 2007.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 20th, 2006 at 3:17 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.