Professional photographers digital photo management tool, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, ships.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom ships to photographers

After much time in beta, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom has shipped to professional photographers.

Photography is an essential part of the creative cycle. And professional photographers, as well as graphic designers and art directors, have long used digital image editors to adjust and retouch photographs.

Traditionally Adobe Photoshop has been the image editor of choice. But Photoshop can be a very large and complex tool and is not geared specifically at managing and processing large volumes of digital images.

This is where photographer's tools such as Adobe Photoshop Lightroom come in. In direct competition to Apple's Aperture, Lightroom aims to provide professional photographers with a photo management system for processing large amounts of RAW images. Indeed Adobe Photoshop Lightroom has support for over 150 camera raw formats and also supports JPEG, TIFF, DNG file formats.

As would be expected Lightroom also has a suite of tools for editing photographs. These include tools for globally correcting white balance, exposure, tone curves, lens distortion and color casts. It can also arrange photographs into libraries and collections to help browse and compare images. It also has elements of asset management tools and allows users to use keywords to help find images.

There are also global adjustment tools which allow photographers to apply filters and color correction to a batch of images in one go. Lightroom also contains several export and presentation features, including contact sheets, web galleries and slide shows.

What is also a bonus for users of Photoshop, is that the two applications can work together. Changes made to files in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom are carried through to Photoshop CS2 and visa versa.

Lightroom is available for Windows XP PC systems with at least a Pentium 4 processor and Macintosh PowerPC or Intel computers, preferably with at least 1GB of RAM. It costs US$199 as an introductory offer, rising to US$299 after April 2007.

Adobe Lightroom

7 October 2006

Photography and Photoshop related discussions in the graphic design forums

• Has Digital Photography Reduced the Quality of Graphic Reproduction?
• Aperture versus Lightroom – which is the best for an amateur photographer?
• Fixing grainy pictures in Photoshop – pictures taken with a 35mm camera that came out grainy and need to be fixed.
• Digital photography – what's the difference between RAW format and JPEGs?
• Photography and graphic design – from photography to graphic design. Is it possible with a photography degree?
• Digital photography and graphic design – how has digital photography affected graphic design?

Related Photoshop and photography articles

• Adobe CS3 product details
• Speeding up Photoshop
• Adobe Photoshop CS3 Beta
• Corel Painter X
• Adobe Production Studio
• Digital photography listings
• Photography listings
• Image libraries