Adobe released their new version of Photoshop Lightroom as public beta on 30 day trial yesterday.
Lightroom is a version of Photoshop just for photographers – actually, it’s a high quality digital image processor with integrated database management. That means it manages your image files as well as gives you the tools to manipulate them.
The first version was very cool, but this version seems to have a whole load of new enhancements and they’re inviting us (the public) to comment and become part of the development process. It’s pretty buggy at the moment, but the idea is to get a hands on test drive of what the new product will be capable of.
Lightroom doparts from Photoshop in that it has nondestructive editing. Changes are recorded as metadata that leaves the underlying digital file unaltered. The big advantage to digital photographers is that it handles the RAW file format that come unprocessed from camera image sensors. Raw images offer more flexibility and higher quality.
The big advancement in this version is ‘local editing’, which just means that you can edit small areas of the image. You won’t need to move images to Photoshop to work on small areas, then move them back again.
There’s already a lot of noise about the new release, and a lot of useful tutorial information is starting to surface. The National Association of Photoshop Professionals have already published the Lightroom 2 Learning centre to showcase the new features.
The public Beta is available from Adobe Labs
