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Lightroom February 4th
I've
been playing around with the public beta test of Lightroom for the past couple
of weeks, and figured I would take a few minutes to do a write up on it.
The first thing that jumped out at me about this app is how much flash is
being leveraged in it. It didn't take Adobe long after its official acquisition
of Macromedia to begin integrating their technology into new apps. This product
is just oozing with it, from slide up / slide down menu's to dissolves this
interface leans heavily on flash, and is probably a sign of things to come
in future offerings. I'd really like to see some more of this in Photoshop.
Something else that stands out as being different from the usual Adobe UI is the use of black as the backdrop. I didn't like it much at first, but the more I use this product the more it makes sense. The black is unobtrusive and allows the photos remain the focus.
While scrolling through photos in the Library view, you'll instantly have access to info such as levels, aperture settings, and aspect ratio.
Additionally, there are some handy features that I've found myself getting used to very quickly Including some things that I've not seen possible to do in other visual apps, such as edit the capture time in the metadata of an image, and exporting slideshows (in HTML, PDF, & Flash flavors)
They have an integrated 5 star rating system (think iTunes) to rate which photos you prefer. Which you can display in the slideshows, or suppress if you prefer.
Lightroom appears
to be competently put together, simple enough for amateurs to use, but will
come off as elementary to a lot of professionals. All in all I'd say this
is going to be a solid entry into the digital photo market when it comes out.
The app isn't as robust as photoshop, but is leagues ahead of iPhoto. So if
you're an amateur looking to take it to the next level, this will fit the
bill nicely.