Filed under: Macworld, Software, Apple Professional
Adobe targets Aperture with Lightroom
Remember when
Steve said that Aperture is not a competitor to
Adobe's products, but a companion? Perhaps Adobe didn't take Steve's message to heart. Earlier today at Macworld, Adobe
released the public beta of Lightrooom, a new,
professional digital imaging application that has much of the same functionality as Aperture.Adobe states that their focus with Lightroom is the image itself. As such, Lightroom's UI features a "Lights Out" mode, which allows the tools and pallets to fade into the background at a single click, emphasizing the image itself. Similar to Aperture, Lightroom also sports a zoom feature, allowing you to focus on a specific area of detail.
You can download the 111MB beta from the Adobe-Macromedia Labs website. Recommended system requirements are Mac OS X 10.4.3, 1GHz PowerPC G4 processor, 768MB RAM and a 1024x768 resolution display. Pricing and future release dates have not been made available.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Aaron Jacobs said 12:27PM on 1-09-2006
The 111MB beta is the one with the sample content; there is an 8MB download without it.
Also, Lightroom is apparently not a knee-jerk reaction to Aperture and has been in development for years. See the link below:
http://photoshopnews.com/2006/01/09/the-shadowlandlightroom-development-story/
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J.Stone said 1:13PM on 1-09-2006
Working with it for about an hour. So far, so good. Offers many edits within the program, many like Photoshop CS. Certainly faster, smoother than Aperture on a PB 1.33 1g ram. 1g because like many others lower ram slot has stopped functioning on my PB. Imports RAW from Canon 20d without problems. More later for those interested. Aloha
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Daddy said 1:29PM on 1-09-2006
This is a serious blow to Apple's Apperature.
Apperature 1.0 has so many bugs, it might as well be called a beta. The real problem here is who wants to spend $499.99 for a beta?
Adobe takes the right road and chooses not to have their customers pay to debug their product. Good for you Adobe!! Shame on you Apple.
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Mike said 1:45PM on 1-09-2006
It's definitely got more bells and whistles that iPhoto5 but If found it fairly slow on my G4 iBook 1.33 GHz 1gig ram. I didn't spend much time playing with it however. Seemed to handle the 285 photos (jpegs) that I imported really smoothly, but the previews don't seem all that crisp to me. I imagine that on a wide screen display the experience would be a lot more enjoyable than on my 12 inch screen.
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fra said 1:52PM on 1-09-2006
I only got 256MB of ram, how do I tick it into thinking I have enough ram?
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Greg said 1:58PM on 1-09-2006
Not bad for an app that takes something like 9 MB on my hard disk and that's all it needs to run!
Running it on 12" iBook with 512 RAM, is pretty OK.
Not too many features though (or I couldn't find them?), I think Aperture offers a lot more, such as Lift&Stamp and so on.
Have not tested with RAW files yet.
It has one H-U-G-E advantage over Aperture: you can have only links to your images and doesn't force you to copy them into its own hidden library. You can work with external files.
But the UI is far behind any Apple product, it's just too Adobe-ish, lots of buttons everywhere. Will see.
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mys said 3:24PM on 1-09-2006
Aperture feels a lot faster on a Dual G5 (2GHz) but Lightroom will be a pretty nice application not only because I can open my Pentax RAW Files. As Greg mentioned I can also keep my folder structure and link the files to lightroom. The UI is strange, but its beta.
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Zon Wakest said 4:17PM on 1-09-2006
doesn't it seem weird that there is only a mac version at right now? as far as I know this is currently the only adobe app thats mac only at the moment, so I would guess thats saying it is directly targeting aperture.
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Aaron Jacobs said 6:50PM on 1-09-2006
Zon, please see my post. This application has been in development for years; it's not a direct response to Aperture. And you say it's unique in being the only Adobe app that is Mac-only, but it's also unique in being the only public beta Adobe has done in recent memory. So I would guess the Mac-only part is due to it being unfinished. There will be a Windows version at release-time.
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Phil Aaronson said 6:18PM on 1-15-2006
My theory is that Adobe never really intended to release Lightroom. Mac only Cocoa code base, Lua scripting, and overlaps with Photoshop, it all points in that direction. It was only after Adobe got wind of Aperture that it got the green light. I've written a bit more about this on my blog:
http://www.hinkty.com/blogger/2006/01/lightroom-photoshop-and-adobe.html
Phil
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