[Daniel] Adobe Lightroom Beta v1

I tested out Adobe's Lightroom beta last night to get a sense of what it was all about. My overall feeling is that while it's decent, I'm not as impressed as I felt I ought to be by using a professional grade application. I tried out both the stand-alone version (12 Mb) as well as the version that came with RAW samples (110 Mb). Both were beta v1. The betas were run on a 933 Mhz iBook G4 w/ 640Mb of RAM, Mac OS X 10.4.4 and few other applications running.



User Interface

The UI is moderately quick and entirely custom (uses no Mac OS X widgets to speak of). Making this even more difficult is the completely different feel of the widgets. I was over 30 minutes into using the application before realising I could scroll some of the panels because the scroll bar did not look like anything I had used before.



Speed is a little slow in just about everywhere, which is expected during a beta. Especially hindered were the transitions between workflow areas, scrolling and selecting. Again, this should improve substantially by the time the official release hits. It does use some of the same concepts as Aperture, such as stacks and whatnot. It also has a literal Lightroom mode that, by hitting the "L" key, causes the screen around the visible images to darken then go black if "L" is pressed again. This allows the photographer to compare the photos easily without distraction. It also has a slideshow view to go through the pictures at a large size.



A feature it lacks that Aperture possesses is the abilty to layout the photos in a pleasing way for presentation purposes. The UI present in Lightroom is very functional only and obviously targeted specifically at, and only at, the photographer.



The other painful aspect was the issue of thumbnails. Even after importing .jpg pictures off my camera (which are significantly smaller than RAW), the creation of thumbnails was slow. Worse still, if you moved quickly from the import to the slideshow, images that had not yet been processed (thumbnail creation happens in the background) would play in the slideshow as a giant, pixelated image as though the slideshow were being played through an Atari. Very disorienting and unexpected.



Picture Manipulation

The picture quality is fantastic. I lack a digital camera that can take RAW photos but the quality was obvious when playing with the version that included samples. While some manipulations are possible from the Library area of the workflow, most take place in the Develop area. Here, a good range of editing options are available, including some easy preset changes. Photoshop it was not but a substantial amount could be done in this area. There are a wide variety of color adjustments, some noise and lens correction options and curves present, though not all appeared to be in a working state. A histogram appears in the upper left at all times and displays the effects of your changes on it. Also present was a very useful eye-dropper, which instead of grabbing the color of the pixel beneath the cursor, allowed you to adjust the entire image automatically by selecting a white pixel from the picture.



A feature missing from Lightroom is the ability to fix red-eye. Even my copy of iPhoto handles red-eye adjustments so it was surprising to find it missing from Lightroom.



Lightroom is also missing a way to select portions of the image for editing/adjusting, which I found equally puzzling.



Import

Importing was a very different experience from using an application such as iPhoto. The interface displays a new window (one of the only times during use of Lightroom). It displays the photos taken, grouped by the day they were taken on. They allow/encourage you to set up collections, keywords and other metadata about the images up front.



The only confusing part was in choosing what photos not to import, as it was a non-obvious process. Afterward, the photos were placed directly in my library and the thumbnail generation process started (which lasted about 15 minutes for 22 .jpg pictures - not so great).



Export

I tested out several of the export capabilities already present, including the HTML export, the Flash export and the PDF export. All worked well, with the HTML version dumping a web page that had a gallery/slideshow on it, the Flash version which also generated a web page that included a smooth and aesthetically-pleasing Flash gallery and the PDF generating a PDF file, one image per page. All were good quality and easy to perform.



Print

Lightroom's Adobe heritage shines through in this regard. The print settings are widely varied and very capable. It is easy to generate many different layouts, including a one-click contact sheet. The quality preserved here is equally impressive.



Overall

While the existing features already present in Lightroom are good, my personal feeling after using Lightroom is that of wanting. As it stands, Lightroom strikes me a iPhoto for photographers. Decent, but not near the features I would expect out of a professional application. When I can do 90% of the Lightroom functions from iPhoto (a consumer application), there isn't much allure in spending what will likely be a several hundred dollar application.



Adobe is clearly trying to get a foothold in a market that is finally beginning to accept new technology. More and more pro photographers are starting to go digital as the SLR cameras have improved. While Apple's Aperture may have an early lead, Adobe's approach appears to be that by getting photographers attention early and letting them try before they buy, the photographers can influence the direction of the application and will see what it can do before dropping money on it. Adobe benefits from both of these things greatly as it minimizes their risk in developing a new application and gaining market acceptance. It will be interesting to see if it pays off for them.



Adobe is working on creating a Windows port of the beta which they expect to release in the near future for testing purposes. The current beta expires in June 2006. Download