Why Lightroom Is Not Included With Any CS3 Suite

I have been asking this question to folks like John Nack and Tom Hogarty, but I never felt I had got to the root of the matter. I asked another Adobe person this question last week, and his answer makes the most sense.

In my interview with John Hogarty, I learned that there were no plans to include Lightroom with any CS3 suite and that it was designed to be a standalone product. Fair enough—but I was curious what the reasoning behind this was. Lightroom will be a major part of the process for many creative professionals’ work.

My answer came at the recent meeting of my local InDesign User Group, which I recommend anyone to join if they have a chapter close by and they use InDesign. I asked the presenter afterwards why Lightroom wasn’t included with any CS3 suite and he said it was done very purposefully—because Lightroom will be updated and upgraded faster than the other CS3 applications, and he expected to see Lightroom 2.0 yet this year. The reason why is the nature of the digital photography market: things are changing rapidly, more so than the creative pro market in general, and Lightroom cannot stick to an 18-month upgrade cycle the same way other Adobe apps do. This makes a lot of sense, and makes me excited to see what they come up next with Lightroom. Maybe they’ll get five stars out of five after all!

The presenter, by the way, was Adobe’s Adam Pratt who gave a good presentation on InDesign CS3.