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Adobe Lightroom Beta for Windows has arrived!

labs.adobe.com — Great news: Adobe Lightroom beta software 1.0 for Windows is now available. Download it today and discover an easier way to import, organize, edit, and showcase large volumes of digital images. Designed by photographers, for photographers, it's software that works the way you do. And with its new Windows compatibility, it's just waiting for you

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  • DannyX0, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3direct download link:
    http://trials.adobe.com/pub/esd/labs/lightroom/lightroom_b3_samples_07-18.msi (may or may not work, some 1 plz verify)
    • rfinn, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2direct link doesn't work for me, but the Windows version is there - very cool
    • matija, on 10/12/2007, -4/+2anyone got a link to the file? i'm registered but it's down for me
  • DannyX0, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/entitlement/index.cfm?event=custom&sku=RC00244&e=labs_lightroom
    or (added extras)
    http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/entitlement/index.cfm?event=custom&sku=RC00245&e=labs_lightroom

    if those don't work, then just sing up 4 it urself :)
  • Battlecry, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7bugmenot is my friend
  • egingras, on 10/12/2007, -7/+1Adobe = dugg? :o
  • resetpassword, on 10/12/2007, -8/+2lightroom is not launching for me.
    • elomire678, on 10/12/2007, -7/+0It's not launching for me, either. Are they requiring SSE2 for it? I did notice that they had Pentium 4 for their minimum requirements, so if it needs SSE2 that might explain why it's not launching on my Athlon XP.
  • micramm, on 10/12/2007, -12/+3I installed it. Any simple task took forever. I think Picasa is much much better.
    • Oniony, on 10/12/2007, -12/+3A Picassa comparison would be nice. Anyone?
    • philodox1, on 10/12/2007, -0/+13This program is not meant for simple photo organization, a la Picasa or iPhoto. It is meant for pro photographers (and serious hobbyists) that capture all their images in RAW format (which is uncompressed, unlike JPEG from most point and shoots) and allow them to fine tune for exposure, sharpness, color balance, etc. Copying and pasting all these similar adjustments to an entire batch of images, cropping, rotating, examing for dust spots from SLR sensor... it really comes in handy when an average photo shoot is in the, say, 1000+ image range.

      I will be the first to admit that the simplicity of photo organization in Picasa is superior to both Lightroom and Apple's Aperture, they are not meant to be tools in the same toolbox.
    • cell-gfx, on 10/12/2007, -3/+3I agree with the fact it's a resource hog, but excusing it away as 'it's not in the same toolbox' is a load of rubbish. If it hits your CPU up for 92% processor just for changing the exposure of a 1Mb JPG, how will it perform with RAW images of much larger sizes? The interface is sluggish, though the tools produce excellent results given a chance! Speed it up and they've got a nice product there.
    • philodox1, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3The reason why I say "not in the same toolbox" is because you don't use Picasa to handle and develop RAWs, and you don't use Aperture/Lightroom to simply organize photos and remove red eye.

      I use all three. Picasa on my PC for all my Canon Elph snapshots while out with friends or whatever, and was using Lightroom but switched to Aperture (after 1.1) for all my SLR hobby/professional photography. I like them all, but you can not easily swap Picasa with Aperture or Lightroom to accomplish the same function.
    • crawfishsoul, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3It's a beta, quit complaining and submit your comments to Adobe.

      Otherwise, don't use it.
  • ryness, on 10/12/2007, -26/+1this is the dumbest thing ever.
  • JamesWilson, on 10/12/2007, -18/+2Digg this if you think Picasa is better.
    Comment below if you have other suggestions for photo organization software. kthx.
    • sl4x0r, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4I shoot RAW (NEF) and I'm a huge fan of Picasa as far as workflow organization goes, mainly because of it's FAST rendering of preview images. Editing is done in Photoshop and now I'm moving to Nikon Capture NX (Better control because of Nikon's damned RAW encryption). Hope this software can handle Nikon's white balance encryption.
    • gerkin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2This comment tells me it's pretty obvious that you didn't actually read what it's all about -- it's not "photo organizing software" LOL .. that's a very very small piece of what it does. Can your 'ogranizing software' do HSL split toning? Can it do it non destructively?

      As much as Adobe hates to admit it, in the pro photographer's realm this is the Photoshop killer IMHO.
  • lilgryph, on 10/12/2007, -10/+4If Picasa handles RAW, then it is better...
  • lizunlong, on 10/12/2007, -3/+1for more easily download
    http://trials.adobe.com/pub/esd/labs/lightroom/lightroom_b3_standalone_07-18.msi
  • coheedcollapse, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9This isn't simple photo organization guys, if you really need an adobe program for that, go for Elements, it integrates the old album program, and it has better editing features than Picasa (although I personally use Picasa to organize and Photoshop CS to edit).

    This isn't for amateurs or casual photo takers as much as it's for people who do it for a living. It's a program that is able to catalog and edit the RAW format photograph straight off instead of downloading addons and personally, I think it does a damn fine job of doing that (better than anything else I have).

    To reiterate: This is NOT for the average photographer, but if you take in RAW often, I suggest you give it a shot (that or you could try the free version of "Rawshooter" which has always worked for me.)
    • arcterex, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Agreed. I really hope this comes out soon and is a bit more feature complete. I don't see a way to simply launch PS from here (though I only played around with a bit last night), addition of stacks/versioning looks like it's heavily requested in the forums will also be the killer feature. Copying some of the aperture stuff like display by time interval (ie: separate into groups of pictures shot near each other) would be nice as well. However, for a beta it's pretty good. 6.8mb download as well is nice and light, and the fact I can just point it at my existing file structure is the clincher for me.
  • bosse, on 10/12/2007, -8/+3this entry is stupid. it sounds like a marketing monkey at Adobe have been going at it.
  • Thorandor, on 10/12/2007, -3/+2I tried Adobe Lightroom, and to be honest, it did not really improve my workflow as compared to the Creative Suite that I already have. While I do agree that Lightroom is an ideal (well, in some ways) companion for the photographer, I have to say that it was much easier for me to work on digital images via Adobe Bridge (simply because everything was more or less set up for press-quality anyway).

    Just my 2 cents
  • phidong, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7I posted in the other one and it didn't get dugg, but I gave Lightroom a try for about 15-20 minutes. The good news is that it is multithreaded and activity on both of my cores was very active during usage. The bad news is it seems like a bad port to Windows. High activity on both cores (100% usage) for most of the tasks didn't help to speed things up at all. Collapsing and opening the control panes was sluggish. All of the adjustment sliders felt really muddy (not precise at all). To add to the problem, the adjustment sliders don't seem to make the adjustments in real time (or at least it's so slow that it isn't done in real time), which means you have to drag the slider to where you "think" it needs to be, wait.. wait... for it to load and then make a micro adjustment or two after that.

    That's great if you're patient and you're processing one image but that's really not what Lightroom was built for. I can't even imagine sitting through and adjusting 100 or so images. Again, I realize this is BETA and I was quickly reminded when I first imported some images and it crashed right away. The fact though, is that it shouldn't take 2-3 seconds to generate previews for each image when you click on them (Working...). The thumbnails loaded up fast and after that everything chugs along like a snail.

    If you're looking to process a lot of images, look towards Bibble. It's multi-threaded and blazing fast. Adjustments occur on the fly (you can even adjust using keyboard shortcuts) and processing is quick too. On my system a RAW->JPG takes less than 5 seconds. You can get a free trial from the Bibble website. - http://www.bibblelabs.com/

    If you're looking to organize and tag a lot of images, look at iView Media (recently purchased by Microsoft). A much better program for cataloging than Lightroom appears to be. The idea behind Lightroom is nice, an all in one package, however as of now it appears to do all those things poorly. I would rather work in several programs that do their respective tasks very well, imo.

    Lightroom has a long way to go.
    • andrewmurphy, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Having used Bibble for on site action photography processing for about 2 years, I have to say, I'm glad to be rid of the POS, thanks to Aperture. Bibble was ridiculously slow when it came to processing large quantities of RAW NEF images, on a dual processor 2.5ghz G5 with 5gb of memory no less, and had all kinds of 'quirks,' my favorite of which were crashing any time you pressed the letter 't' and having to preview every page of a contact sheet print job in order to make sure it didn't leave any empty spots on the page.

      That said, I have a few major bones to pick with aperture...
      1) Why can't I export my projects and maintain their file structure? I have to manually export 'processed' images to an identical folder structure, and its really annoying

      2) Printing sucks. Even after spending some time with some mac geniuses, a coworker and I weren't able to properly adjust the margin around an 8x10 image so it would print at a usable size; On contact sheets you can't turn off the 'title' of whatever meta data you are displaying (it will output 'Version: 002' under the image instead of '002' and there's no way to turn that off)


      Lightroom wise, I'm not too sure. While I haven't tested it out too much, the little bit of time I have used it has made me not care for the interface. IMO it feels cumbersome, but then again I have become used to Aperture. Either way, I'm all for competition and will drop one product for another at the drop of a hat it means an improvement to our development/proofing process.
    • jbuberel, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I would like to also very high recommend Bibble Pro from Bibble Labs. It is affordable and extremely powerful. It was built very specifically for the pro (or pro-wanna-be, like me) photographer around processing of RAW/NEF image files. The user interfaces does take some learning, but the batch processing capabilities are amazing.

      Please do check it out:

      http://www.bibblelabs.com/
    • Mach5, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1u/p: skpefhccclqgyg@mailinator.com / bugmenot
  • angler8890, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3That's great if you're patient and you're processing one image but that's really not what Lightroom was built for. I can't even imagine sitting http://www.ppbv.info/sitemap.xml through and adjusting 100 or so images. Again, I realize this is BETA and I was quickly reminded when I first imported some images and it crashed right away.
  • GrahamStw, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Damn you Adobe!

    I was/am a big fan of the workflow and controls in RawShooter from pixmantec http://www.pixmantec.com/

    Especially since the "RawShooter essentials 2006" product was completely free.
    But Adobe have just bought them out so that they can use their tech in Lightroom (and charge for it).
    • JRBlack10, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Thanks for the tip... I went and grabbed my self a FREE copy of the RawShooter essentials 2006.
  • Shivatron, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I downloaded and installed it when I got the notification email last night. Initial impressions: as mentioned, it's slow, even compared to Bridge (one of the slower viewers out there). In fact, Camera Bits' Photo Mechanic looks like a jackrabbit on methamphetamine compared to Lightroom, especially as far as rendering thumbnails is concerned.

    This is also BETA software, folks: it's unstable (crashed on me during an import last night), and in my opinion there are still some user interface tweaks that could be made to clean things up a bit.

    But even at this early stage in the game, you can see the promise. In the Library module, it's very easy to jump to 100% and then back to fit-in-window, which needless to say are the two most common zooms for professional photographers like myself. A live 3-channel histogram can be seen where it matters (in Quick Develop and in Develop). The Develop module puts everything right at your fingertips, and adds a couple of innovative features; for example, you can change white balance in a JPEG (by letting Lightroom adjust the color balance no doubt), which is remarkably convenient. Also, editing is lossless -- if you don't like a change you can zip back to the original.

    Lightroom has a long way to come, but like any new and innovative software package (think Final Cut Pro a number of years ago), those who spend the time to learn how to use it effectively will no doubt be rewarded by an integrated solution that replaces the multiple programs for importing, viewing, editing and printing digital files. I'm not going to be throwing out Photo Mechanic, iView, CS2, et cetera just yet (and perhaps never), but I will be devoting some time to working with Lightroom despite it's shortcomings.
  • Justathought, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1There was a good discussion at the Lightroom forums about why Adobe should make a Linux version.

    http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/webforums/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=589&threadid=1101800&highlight_key=y&keyword1=linux

    I think it is a matter of time.
  • xxdesmus, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1My only question is, Who is this aimed at? I have a fairly beefy system (P4 at 3.6Ghz, 2GB Ram, 7800GT OC) and this program is still sluggish as all hell. A "normal" desktop is going to have a tough time with this app unless they speed it up a ton.

    And yes, I've been using the Mac version since beta 1, so I've used it plenty before, and I know this is only beta.
    • arcterex, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I used it on an xp2600 (2ghz) with 1G ram and a ATI9800pro (128mb I belive) and it's library performance was acceptable with a couple of thousand images loaded in. The sluggish part came in when I was editing RAW images (13mb pentax raw) however I assume that this will get the the speed of adobe camera raw from PS CS2 eventually.
    • xxdesmus, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1yeah, I didn't have issues with JPG or PNG images ...I only ran into slow performance when editing RAW images as well.
  • JohnyRed, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0LightBox should takeoff once they add some Web integration to it. According to the tutorial, Adobe is working on it.
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