Adobe's Lightroom debuts hot on the heels of Apple Aperture; for those who don't require the compositing and effects tools in Photoshop, these applications provide a more work-flow-oriented approach to photographic production tasks -- specifically viewing, selecting, organising, retouching and outputting photos.
After working with the initial beta version a bit, Lightroom feels, er, a little light. It acquits itself suitably well in the prettier-than-thou competition, and Adobe certainly gets brownie points for being able to run on a system that costs less than $5,000.
Though Aperture's minimum requirements are a 1.8GHz G5-based system with 1GB of RAM, reportedly it takes a lot more power, and Apple recommends a Dual 2GHz Power Mac G5 or faster with 2GB of RAM. Beta 1 of Lightroom ran fairly comfortably on a 2.1GHz iMac.
And unlike Aperture, Lightroom will be available for the PC when it ships at the end of this year. Finally, Lightroom doesn't suffer from Aperture's most glaring flaw: the inability to work with layered Photoshop images.
Adobe breaks Lightroom into four different modules, though it does flow fairly seamlessly from one to the next. Take a tour of Lightroom, Beta 1. Click the screenshot for a tour of the program.
At least in its current state, Lightroom is missing some key capabilities, such as Web-portfolio output, version stacks (which are even included in Adobe's AU$189 Photoshop Elements 4), and a free-form slide-table view.
Furthermore, it still behaves a bit too unpredictably for anything other than idle usage. We'd wait for another version or two of the beta before trying it out.
