Digital photography

Adobe releases rival photographic tool to Apple's Aperture

Adobe have released a freely downloadable public beta version of their professional photographer's tool for importing, selecting and showcasing large numbers of digital photographs.

Several dozen RAW file formats are supported, including most popular digital cameras, such as the Canon EOS and PowerShot series, the Kodak DCS range, most Konica Minolta cameras, Nikon and Olympus.

Called Adobe Lightroom, it will allow digital photographers to import, view, zoom in and compare large groups of digital images. Lightroom also allows the editing of images, with features aimed specifically at digital photographers.

The original public beta was a Mac only product, but has now been updated for Windows-based photographers as well. The latest version of Adobe Lightroom, beta 3 is available as free download from the Adobe site – with an option at first launch to populate Lightroom with sample images, projects and metadata if you don't have a current library of images to experiment with.

It is worth noting that the Windows version has a few features missing compared to the Mac OS X version, including the automatic detection of cameras and memory cards for import. However, Adobe have stated that the final versions of Lightroom will both have an identical feature set. The Mac version is a universal binary software application that will run natively both on PowerPC Macs and also on the new Intel-based Macintoshes

6 January 2006 (updated 20 July 2006 and 25 February 2007)

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