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Adobe Lightroom Review
onethumb writes "Andy over at Digital Grin got his hands on a pre-release copy of Adobe's hot new app 'Lightroom' last week and has a nice review up. Adobe Lightroom, is designed to go head-to-head with Apple's own recently released Aperture. Is digital photo editing finally getting both powerful and easy?"
Yes, I know it's an Alpha-Beta (non-feature complete Beta) but it's missing a lot of stuff you'd expect even from a first draft at this kind of app:
* No PSD support for external editing of files (16-bit TIFF)
* No "Copy Image" (much less Versions or Stacks as Aperture has them).
* No Crop or Rotate
It does have some nice features. The printing and slideshow part are well done. The Lightroom take on Levels is rather interetsing and I think easier for people who do not use Photoshop much to use.
However Aperture at this point has a serious lead out of the gate, that combined with the Lightroom team also having to try and support a Windows build eventually may let Apple not only keep but increase the lead.
Also I have to say I am concerned with the caching strategy in Lightroom - every image has a same-size JPG created along with decreasing half sizes images as well. That can take up a lot of space. And the editing information for any given image seems to only be stored in the central database, not in sidecar files alongside the image. Thankfully they do back up this database automatically.
Some people will be happy to be able to use images in-place in directories. However as there is no support for conepts like versions or stacks people may be less happy when those harder-to-map kinds of things make it in the program and start making the life of a directory more complicated.
One good thing is that the competiton between Apple and Adobe in this space should yield a pretty solid application over time. I just hope Adobe is in this for the long run, and the release (currently planned around the end of 2006 according to the FAQ) has a pretty solid product.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Here's another page that goes into the nitty-gritty a little more.
Orange whip? Orange whip? Three orange whips.
That's because Aperture is doing its layer processing in real-time using CoreImage and storing it in an SQLite database through CoreData.
As for the submission:
Is digital photo editing finally getting both powerful and easy?
It already was with apps like iPhoto (easy), Photoshop (powerful), and others. Aperture is geared toward professional photographers processing RAW format images. The submitter obviously has no idea what these apps are and what they're for--they're not supposed to be consumer-level photo-editing apps. They're professional photography pre-processing applications.
"Sufferin' succotash."