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Adobe released a new public beta version of its Lightroom photo editing and workflow management software on Wednesday.
Lightroom 2.0 adds support for 64-bit environments on both Mac OS X and Windows Vista. It also adds non-destructive editing of localized areas within images, so you can adjust the exposure of the background of a photograph, for example, without altering the foreground.
There are other, smaller enhancements. The new Smart Collections feature helps you organize your photo library by automatically sorting images based on ratings, keywords or date -- just like Smart Playlists in iTunes. Lightroom 2.0 also adds support for multiple monitors, a must for a serious digital darkroom. Photoshop guru John Nack has the details on his blog at Adobe.com.
While Adobe Photoshop has long been the killer app in the professional photog's toolkit, the growing culture of photo sharing on the web plus dropping prices on high-end digital gear has led to the emergence of a new breed of hybrid software applications which act more as workflow managers.
Lightroom, along with Aperture, Apple's competing "digital darkroom" application, have gained momentum with the prosumers who gather at websites like Zooomr and Flickr. These apps are stripped-down versions of their heavyweight big brothers, made more for organizing, editing and processing dozens of photos on the fly than fine-tuning all the details of the images.
(Be sure to read Wired's previous take on this phenomenon, "Major Photoshop Upgrade Is Overkill for the Flickr Crowd").
There's been a lot of activity around these apps just recently, as well. Last month Apple debuted Aperture 2, a revamped version of its workflow tool, adding support for popular photo-sharing sites, opening up the application to third-party plug-in developers and dropping the price from $300 to $200. Just last week, Adobe debuted the lightweight, browser-based version of Photoshop. Adobe also recently pulled a major update to Lightroom because of support problems with newer cameras.
Those interested in testing all of the new features can download the free beta of Lightroom 2.0 from Adobe Labs, which will work for 30 days. If you have a license for Lightroom 1.x, you'll be able to keep testing it until the end of August, 2008. The full version of Lightroom 1.0 costs $300. While the beta for 2.0 is free, there's no word yet on how much the final version will cost.
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