Digital Home Thoughts: Adobe Releases Photoshop Lightroom 2.0

"Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced the immediate availability of Adobe® Photoshop® Lightroom® 2 software, the photographer's essential toolbox for managing, adjusting and presenting large volumes of digital photographs. With new enhancements such as dual-monitor support, radical advances in non-destructive localized image correction, and streamlined search capabilities, Lightroom 2 is a compelling upgrade that simplifies photography from shoot to finish. As Adobe's first application to support 64-bit for Mac OS X 10.5 Macintosh computers with Intel® processors and Microsoft® Windows® Vista® 64-bit operating systems, Lightroom 2 also provides improved memory performance for dealing with large scale images."

Lightroom 1.x is what I use to process my raw files and for the most part, it's a great program. The list of features in 2.0 looks pretty good, although nothing earth-shattering. The funny thing is that I got a copy of Lightroom 1.0 for review, but kept having little issues with it and in discussing the problems with my Adobe PR person, I wanted to wait until I stopped seeing memory issues with it before writing my review. They released the 1.4.1 update a month or so ago (perhaps a bit longer) and the software was finally stable and more or less glitch free, so I was planning on reviewing it last week but didn't get around to it. Lo and behold, Adobe releases Lightroom 2.0! I knew Lightroom 2.0 was in public beta, but I didn't think they'd take it to production so quickly. It's either remarkably error-free, or it will be like Lightroom 1.0 and have some initial issues. I hope Adobe has learned their lesson with version 1.0...