Adobe announced today that Lightroom 2, a major update to their photography workflow app, is now available. Lightroom 2 will cost you $299, with an upgrade price of $99, but it includes a host of new features, improvements, and general whizbangery.

The biggest news for Mac users is that Lightroom 2 is Adobe's first native 64-bit app for OS X. Also new in Lightroom 2:

• Libraries can span harddrives
• Customizable print templates
• Smart Collections to automatically organize photos

And much more. The Lightroom 2 Learning center has a nice list of new and improved features. And to help you Lightroom 1.0 users decide whether or not to upgrade Adobe has a comparison of Lightroom 1 vs. Lightrooom 2.

Lightroom 2 requires OS X 10.4 or above, and a 1 GHz G4 processor or better.

Adobe has dropped updates for both Lightroom and Camera Raw. According to the Lightroom team's blog, the updates include all the changes of the previous releases, but also correct a few issues. Lightroom 1.4.1 will keep the EXIF time date field of images from being incorrectly modified, and has fixes for Olympus JPEG files and also DNG conversion. And the Camera Raw plugin update also fixes the EXIF problem as well as the Olympus JPEG features.

But that's more than you wanted to know, right? All you really need to know is that you can grab the update either on Adobe's site, or by hitting "Check for updates" under the Help menu for the Lightroom update and using the Adobe Update Manager for the Raw plugin update. Happy updating!

[Via Ars]

Over at the Adobe Labs Lightroom site, the beta for Lightroom 2 is now available. John Nack revealed that among other things (release notes PDF) version 2 will feature 64-bit support as well as a new Retouch tool. This marks a shift toward selective editing similar to the new editing plugin architecture that made its appearance with Aperture 2.1.

The Lightroom 2b1 is available for download to "all current Lightroom customers." New customers "can download the beta and try it for thirty days" or hit up a friend who already owns it. It's worth noting that the beta "does not read, upgrade or import catalogs from previous versions of Lightroom" and you should keep using 1.3.1 "for your primary workflow needs."

One particularly annoying thing about plugging in my iPhone is that it always launches Aperture and prompts for permission to import photos. While you should be able to turn this off (in the preferences of the Image Capture application), what if you still want iPhoto (or Aperture, Lightroom, etc.) to launch when you plug in your camera or memory card? Capitalizing on the fact that Image Capture lets you choose any application to run automatically, Sam Stephenson over at 37signals has cooked up a fancy AppleScript to do just this. Once set up it looks to see what you've plugged it; if it's your camera it will launch iPhoto, etc.; if it's your iPhone it won't. The script is slightly complicated and must be customized for your particular camera model, but if you want the convenience of auto-launching your image management application for your camera, without the annoyance of the iPhone, it's worth a look.

[via Daring Fireball]

Last week's Ask TUAW prompted an avalanche of questions, so we're going to have to pace ourselves. For this episode we'll tackle questions about auto-mounting a network drive, sending email across an internet sharing Mac, wearing out iPhone flash, using Adobe XMP photo metadata in Windows and OS X, monitoring bandwidth usage and more.

We'll get to more questions in the near future, but please leave suggestions and new questions in the comments.

Lightroom has been updated to version 1.1, and with it comes a very long list of changes. James Duncan Davidson has taken a good look at the update at Inside Lightroom. Here are a few highlights.

• View the shutter, aperture, and ISO settings you use most often instantly
• Template Browsers in the Slideshow, Print, and Web module are now hierarchical
• By default, slide shows will only include the selected photos (if there is more than one photo selected)
• Various clarity and sharpening improvements

As I said, that's just a small portion of the very long list of improvements that version 1.1 offers. What's more, John Gruber said the process of upgrading from version 1.0 was "...super simple." What more could you want?

[Via Daring Fireball]

Now that I'm on the home stretch of my undergrad (just a thesis project left to finish), I'm finally able to stretch my legs into some hobbies I've been meaning to pick up. One such hobby is photography, and since I've been flexing my digital tools, I've quickly become enamored with Aperture, Apple's professional alternative to iPhoto. Even though I am by no means a professional photographer (no laughing at my pictures!), there are a ton of features in Aperture that drew me away from iPhoto, and I thought highlighting some of these tempting tools would be ripe for a TUAW podcast. Aperture, in my opinion, isn't just for the photographers whose lens bags weigh more than most typical household dogs; it offers a wealth of general features for power users, photography enthusiasts and those who need something that lands right at the intersection of iPhoto and Photoshop in terms of both functionality and price.

Hence, TUAW Podcast #25 was born. For just over twenty minutes I explore some of Aperture's features that I think appeal to a wide audience. Pick up a copy from our iTunes Store Podcast directory, this direct link or our own podcast rss feed.

TUAW reader Sherrod is a photographer on a mission: He's going to examine Lightroom and Aperture side by side, and he needs your help.

He has set up what will be a series of posts looking at each of the applications, with the intention of declaring a winner. Sherrod asks his readers what they'd like to see him examine, outside of his own agenda. So have your say and watch the battle! We look forward to your findings, Sherrod.

Now that Adobe has officially shipped Lightroom (as we recently mentioned), the natural question is: which one is better, Lightroom or Aperture? Of course folks have been playing with the Lightroom beta for quite some time, so this is not new question, but Derrick Story over at MacDevCenter posts on two new series by professional photographers writing for O'Reilly comparing the two software packages. He links to the first post Micah Walter's series for the Inside Aperture blog, and to the start of Michael Clark's initial comparison between the two on the corresponding Inside Lightroom blog. Neither has yet revealed their final conclusions, but it should be interesting to see where they both go. On a related note, Macworld podcast 74 features a discussion of the relative merits of the two packages by Rick LePage (as does this earlier post on TUAW).

From what I can tell so far in many of these discussion, the answer to the question is not going to be entirely straightforward, with one package clearly better than the other. It is more likely that the answer will be something like: it depends on what you want your workflow to look like, and how you want to interact with your images. So TUAW readers, what's your take? Which one do you prefer and why?

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]

Adobe has announced a shipping date of February 19th for Lightroom, their new toolbox for professional photographers that's been in beta for the last year. Lightroom carries a final retail price of $299, but until April 30th, Adobe is saying thanks to everyone who participated in the beta (and lowering the bar for early customers) with a price of $199. The current beta expires February 28th, so either way it's decision time for those who have found a place in their hearts (and workflows) for this professional managing, adjusting and presenting photography software.

For more details on Lightroom, we've been following the betas since Lightroom's introduction, and Macworld also has a nice summary of the latest improvements to the shipping version. Adobe, naturally, also has an official product page with demos, feature tours and interviews with photographers on the beta experience and what it's like to see Lightroom get all growed up, ready to make a difference in the (wide-angled) world of professional photography.

Fraser Speirs already released a Flickr plugin for Aperture, but what about the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom users in the crowd (John Gruber has a nice piece on the ridiculousness of adding the 'Photoshop' prefix to Lightroom's name)? As it turns out, through a little trickery, Lightroom can be tweaked for uploading your images to Flickr.

This Mac OS X Hints post describes the simple setup, as well as a couple of drawbacks, to using Lightroom and the official Flickr Uploadr tool in conjunction; one simply needs to change the external editor preference to the Flickr Uploadr, then chose the Uploadr as the option from the Post-processing page during an export. Check out Mac OS X Hints though for more details and possible inspiration for asking Mr. Speirs (nicely) for a true-blue Lightroom Flickr plugin.

I am solidly in the rank amateur category of photographers, which is why I have never had reason to look into either Aperture or Lightroom. My camera doesn't even shoot in RAW.

However, James Duncan Davidson earns his way by shooting photographs and as such has used both Aperture and Lightroom (which is in beta). He compares and contrasts the two, though there is no clear 'winner' in this battle. Aperture is able to handle a huge volume of photos fairly well, but Lightroom's printing options are miles ahead of Aperture's.

[via Daring Fireball]

This one slipped past us: Adobe has released a third beta of Lightroom, their Aperture-competitor for professional photographers. The release notes are in PDF (I guess HTML is old news for the company who owns both Flash and Acrobat), but overall, improvements include: enhancements to import/export options, live comparisons of image adjustments in Before and After previews, a new straightening tool and a new heavily-requested Web export module with HTML and Flash options.

The new beta can be had here by Mac users, while a beta for Windows (oddly) is yet to be seen. If, for some odd reason, you'd like to be notified when a beta is available for Windows, a sign-up notification form is here.

[thanks to everyone who sent this in!]

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.