Adobe Releases Photoshop Lightroom 2
July 31, 2008 – 6:20 amAdobe on Tuesday released Photoshop Lightroom 2, their flagship photography software program which is intended for professional photographers but has found popularity among amateurs as well.
Over the previous version, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 1.4.1, the new 2.0 version features localized corrections (which enables users to edit specific parts of an image); improved image organization tools; multiple monitor support; more flexible printing options; 64-bit support; and more. There’s also an extensible architecture which enables users to take advantage of a wide range of plug-ins to help them quickly and easily transfer images to favorite sharing sites and photo labs.
There are several enhancements on previously available key features such as batch processing, nondestructive photo editing, output sharpening and more. Adobe licensed image sharpening technology from PhotoKit, which enables automatic application of sharpening settings during printing according to the photo’s size, the printer’s resolution, and other factors.
There is a Windows and a Mac version. The Windows version requires at least an Intel® Pentium 4 processor running Microsoft Windows XP with Service Pack 2 or Windows Vista Home Premium, Business, Ultimate, or Enterprise (certified for 32-bit and 64-bit editions), and at least 1GB of RAM. The Mac OS incarnation demands a PowerPC G4 or G5 or Intel based processor running Mac OS X v10.4 or 10.5 and at least 1GB of RAM. Photoshop Lightroom 2 is priced at $299, and the upgrade is $99.
For now, the only supported languages are English, French, German and Japanese, which indicates where most of the Photoshop Lightroom customers are located.
Tom Hogarty, the Adobe senior product manager in charge of Lightroom, reminded that SLR prices are going down and there are more people who are picking up their cameras to do artistic work rather than just capturing a family event. These people need tools such as Adobe’s offering to process their work.
Adobe has a great rival in this field: Aperture. Fortunately for Adobe, Aperture is only available for Macs, which means that most people will not be able to use it.
Adobe Lightroom was released in January 2007, but the application struggled with early bugs which made critics say that the software was given the green light too early. Adobe Lightroom can be traced back to veteran Photoshop developer Mark Hamburg, and was written mostly from scratch by the team which had already created Adobe’s ImageReady application. They had problems this year with update 1.4, which had serious bugs that could alter the original images. The latest update of v1 is 1.4.1, released April 10th 2008.
In June, Adobe released the version 9 of its Adobe Acrobat software within the newly introduced Creative Suite 3.3, an intermediary release between the Creative Suite 3 and the upcoming Creative Suite 4. The most important feature of Adobe Acrobat 9 is the ability to play Flash and Shockwave content and six other video formats.
Source:efluxmedia.com/news_Adobe_Releases_Photoshop_Lightroom_2_21122.html
