It is mid-February, and you know what
that means: Adobe today announced the immediate availability of it's competitor to Apple's Aperture,
Photoshop Lightroom. Version 1.0 includes the updated Camera Raw 3.7 framework which adds support for a number of new cameras including the Nikon D40 and Pentax K10D. Lightroom is available at a special discounted introductory price of $200 until the 30th of April, after which the price will increase to $300. Current users of the Lightroom beta can continue using the software until the 28th of this month.
I've been using Lightroom since I picked up a Pentax K100D back in December, and I absolutely adore it. The interface is beautiful, it runs pretty darn well on my aging PowerBook, and it seamlessly integrates with Photoshop CS2. Now I just have to figure out how to work the automated processing features and I'll be golden... once I find the cash to pay for the full version.
[via
MacNN]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
olivier Hericord said 11:55AM on 2-19-2007
Lightroom is WAY FASTER than aperture....to straighten a RAW photo on my macbook it's fluid with lightroom and almost IMPOSSIBLE with aperture
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Linh said 1:50PM on 7-17-2007
While Lightroom is faster, I find Aperture much better and organizing. I've also found it a bit difficult to switch over to the Lightroom interface to fully evaluate for myself. So I'll just stick w/ Aperture for now (it would be quite the pain to migrate libraries as well).
But it's good to see some competition. I'd like to see Apple improve on the speed of Aperture w/o having to resort to having a super computer to process photos.
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Al said 1:03PM on 2-19-2007
I've been trying both pieces of software over the last few months and gave Lightroom a final try at the weekend. Today I placed my order for Aperture. Whilst I loved the speed of Lightroom and the printing interface Aperture seems more flexible in terms of how I want to manage my pictures. Whilst the RAW performance isn't as good I can live with it. Nice to have two very good products to choose from and at a reasonable price too.
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Chris Stephens said 3:07PM on 2-19-2007
I too have been evaluating Lightroom and Aperture - and have recently decided to go with Aperture. Once I had appreciated its beautiful organisational abilities there's no going back. Sorry, Lightroom, but you didn't cut the mustard for me!
:)
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Richard Earney said 11:42AM on 2-20-2007
Version 1 has parity with ACR 4, not 3.7. 3,7 is a compatibility release so that settings are not lost if you go between the two
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