Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

"Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today introduced Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 beta software for Macintosh and Windows, a public preview of new and improved functionality to be delivered in the next major release. Lightroom is the essential digital photography workflow solution, helping serious amateur and professional photographers quickly import, manage, enhance and showcase all their images from one application. Available as a free download on Adobe Labs, Lightroom 3 beta delivers a preview of new tools that will be in Lightroom 3, including more intuitive importing, unparalleled noise reduction and sharpening tools, enhanced slideshow capabilities and direct publishing to online photo sharing sites like Flickr. Adobe encourages photographers to test this early selection of new features and provide the product team with their feedback."

Wow - it seems like Lightroom 2 is still the "new" version of Lightroom. Adobe has a very aggressive update schedule for Lightroom, and as long as the new features really warrant a new version number, I'm all for it - v2 of Lightroom was a big jump beyond v1. The big changes seem to be focused around sharing - there's a direct Flickr upload, and a video slideshow output option. Neither feature interests me very much - where's the HDR imaging function that's so obviously missing from the product? Adobe has put up some videos that talk about the new features. The remainder of the press release is after the break. Read more...