Adobe Intros Lightroom Beta

Adobe Systems has introduced the public beta of Adobe Lightroom, designed to deliver a complete photography work-flow, mainly to professional photographers.

nitially available as a beta for Macintosh; Adobe Lightroom will later support both Windows and Macintosh platforms. The final product is expected to be released in late 2006.

The Lightroom beta features a radical new user interface, that puts the spotlight on image; the Lights-Out mode facilitates control panels and tools to fade into the background, letting the image take centre-stage. The Identity Plate feature allows photographers to apply their own branding to the application, while Quick One-to-One Zoom enables instant magnification of finer points within the image.

With Adobe's Camera Raw technology, Lightroom supports over 100 cameras, and integrates raw conversion into a single work-flow experience. Other features of Lightroom include new split-toning controls which create richer black and white images, and the ability to convert imported files into Digital Negative format (DNG), etc.

Further, images can be show-cased through slide-shows; and size and position of images can be manipulated and delivered in Macromedia Flash, Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) and HTML formats.

Shantanu Narayen, president and chief operating officer, Adobe, said, "We first showed an early version of Lightroom at the Adobe Ideas Conference in April 2005, to demonstrate a new streamlined digital photography experience, from capture to print. Today's Lightroom Beta leverages Adobe's renowned digital imaging innovation, in areas such as raw image processing, so that even in beta form, photographers will find world class technology that complements Photoshop. We look forward to the feedback from the photography community, as we refine the product over the next few months."

The public debut of Adobe Lightroom Beta for Macintosh OSX 10.4.3, is scheduled for Jan 10, 2006, at Macworld being held in San Francisco. Recommended system requirements for Adobe Lightroom are; Macintosh OSX 10.4.3, 1 GHz PowerPC G4 processor, 768 MB RAM, and a 1024x768 resolution screen.

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