Adobe’s Photoshop Lightroom, which has been a public beta application for over a year now, has graduated to full application status and is now available for purchase.

Visit [1] Adobe.com and you’ll find that Photoshop Lightroom is now [2] available for purchase. While the application will not be shipping until mid-February 2007 (late February for the French version), you can download it from the Adobe website. If you purchase before April 30, 2007, you can purchase Photoshop Lightroom for $199 (regular price is $299). The Photoshop Lightroom beta will expire on February 28, 2007.

For those not in the know, Photoshop Lightroom gives professional photographers the power to import, manage and present their digital photography. The public beta was released last winter, some would say as a reaction to Apple’s release of Aperture which I reviewed [3] here and [4] here and seems to have improved into a good digital photo management application. Adobe’s approach was to release Photoshop Lightroom as a public beta (back then it was simply called Lightroom). More than a half-million users got their hands on it, so Photoshop Lightroom has the edge in terms of testing and improvements (though Aperture has been around longer and is currently at version 1.5.2).

Some new features added to version 1.0 that is not included in the latest beta (4.1) are:

• Better keywording tools for searching and sorting collections
• Improved import dialog box
• Key Metadata Browser for improved rank and rating system
• Color labels
• Virtual Copies and Snapshot tools for presenting multiples of the same image
• Hue/Saturation and Luminance adjustment tools
• Clone and Healing tools

One big benefit of Photoshop Lightroom over Aperture is in its system requirements: Mac OS X 10.4.3 or Windows XP SP2, 1GHz PowerPC G4, Intel Core Duo or Pentium 4 processor, 768 MB RAM, 1GB of drive space, and a 1024×768 resolution screen. All these are below (sometimes well below) what Aperture requires, and will make Photoshop Lightroom accessible to many more users.