Turns out the rumors were true. Today Adobe released a public beta for Lightroom, their new Aperture-like application for photographers. I spent an hour or so playing with it, and am quite impressed. There are some features missing, but I expect Adobe will correct that before release. Overall it seems quite useable; and snappy.
The Lightroom interface has something vaguely familiar about it.
You can get the beta here.
Well for once it seems that Adobe is not backing down when Apple threatens its product as they did with Premiere. I played around with it too and was totally impressed with this application, it blew Aperture out of the water. And with this just in beta I have to say I am more impressed with the performance over Aperture on my hearty Powerbook G4 1.67.
Yeah, downloaded, complete with the sample images (140 Mb). Then sicc’d it at a few thousand (21K) photos in my iPhoto library… came back after dinner, and had a play – looks good, seems vaguely stable and snappy on iMac G5 @ 2 Ghz. Seems to use a bit less ram than iPhoto with the same library (yay for reference pics at current location option).
Might be worth using. It’s still trying to thumbnail them all tho.
Well, well.. if anything, it can only force Apple to update Aperture pronto, and really take care of those performance issues. I understand the need for power, but really… OSX and it’s derivative technologies need to go on a memory and resource diet. The first NeXT machines were 68040 systems with only 16MB of RAM… ouch!
…apart from the software…what is that car in the picture?
That’s the amazing interior of a Maybach. A magnificent car for rich people.
Here’s an exterior shot –
I am happy to see that Adobe took a better approach to developing a piece of software geared to photographers…. Give it to them and let them tell you what they want and need, an open diaglogue to refining this program . I really think it’s the best way to develop, it creates a giant beta test and it leaves people feeling better about spending the money on the product once its released. Kudos to Adobe.
That’s for everyone who thought that Adobe would leave Apple alone.
And by the way, have you read what John Siracusa wrote about Aperture on this blog ?
And I add more 3 links related to Lightroom:
Photographer Jeff Schewe on the development history of Adobe Lightroom:
http://photoshopnews.com/2006/01/09/the-shadowlandlightroom-development-story/
A review on Lightroom:
http://www.luminous-landscape.com/reviews/software/lightroom1.shtml
Cheers;
Carlos Alberto
Mike, could you (or somebody else) comment in detail on the extent to which the features of Lightroom and Aperture overlap? I’ve only got an iBook G4 and am as thrilled as can be that Lightroom runs fine on it, but I’m not able to run Aperture so I’m wondering what features Lightroom is missing (or has exclusively) compared to Aperture.
The one big one I’m missing in Lightroom is cropping. I imagine that will be in the next beta.
Features i’ve found so far that do NOT exsist in Lightroom but do in Aperture:
No Crop
No Rotate
No Versions (variations on a single RAW, without going to photoshop)
Weaker Metadata implementation,
No SMART Albums or shall we say collections.
No “Lightbox” feature to play around with layout of images
No ability to create books.
No built in back-up function.
Dual Display support : Taking advantage of 2 displays
That being said,
Lightroom is far more responsive to me in most tasks. And the ability to have images exsist outside a library is great. Also as I said in a previous comment the fact that this is a public Beta with Adobe activly looking for suggestions shows great promise for the evolution of this product.
wow, sounds sooo promising after the aperture letdown.
especially the fact that this is Beta 1, and adobe (at the end of the intro video) specifically asks for suggestions, so that this app can truly be “from photographers for photographers”
scott: in the video they very often point out that many (planned) features are not yet implemented, so comparing it to a released product in terms of features is not entirely fair.
you should however send what you think “is still missing” to adobe, so that they can incorporate it. – I’m really hoping this app is going to kick (apertures) ass. what I’ve seen so far, I like!
theFool
theFool, don’t give Scott a hard time — I asked him to make that comparison. The reason I asked was not to trash Lightroom; it was to get an idea of what Aperture is like since I am able to run Lightroom but not Aperture.