Lightroom Video By George Jardine Illuminates The New Beta App

Adobe Pro Photography Evangelist George Jardine presents a 20-minute video that brings up intriguing possibilities but a few questions too

This link will take you to the introductory video about Adobe Lightroom Beta 1, the application for professional photographers to archive, display and print their raw images. Lightroom was announced only a few days ago, and it has actually received relatively scant coverage due to the Macworld Expo, which happened just a few days afterward and was the forum for Apple’s big announcements about the Macbook Pro, its adoption of Intel chips and the release of some new software for the 2006 incarnation of iLife.

After watching this video, it’s clear that while InDesign was seen as a “Quark killer” a few years ago, Lightroom will be seen as an “Aperture killer”. Apple surprised a lot of people a couple months ago when it released this application for importing, organizing, correcting and publishing professional photography; I reviewed the software a few weeks ago and found it sorely lacking in areas such as color-correction and performance on less-than-perfect hardware systems. So the question is, will Adobe, with its keen grasp of the creative professional’s workflow, make the same mistakes? Or will it have all the answers Aperture doesn’t?

I’ve downloaded the beta but haven’t put it through its paces yet or even played around with some of the tutorials available for it. But the Jardine video does give a good overview of the software; here are some interesting notes:

Unlike Aperture, Lightroom lets the user choose where to store images. I scolded Aperture in my review for stashing all imported photographs in its Aperture Library file, which is a Mac OS X package file and not accessible unless you know how to. Lightroom allows you to not only save copies of the raw files, but to save them in whatever folder you like and however you like to name them.

You can add metadata and copyright before importing with Lightroom. I’m curious to see how metadata evolves from the beta to the final product—Jardine said there were more metadata tools in the works—but the ability to add metadata before images are even imported is a plus.

Lightroom will be available for Windows—eventually. Aperture will not, as far as I know.

View your images at full-screen size. Aperture focuses on do-it-yourself book and web publishing, but Lightroom seems to focus instead on slide show presentations within the application. You can view images in a Full Screen view, and the palettes can be hidden at the sides of the screen or dimmed. The slide show also can be imported as a PDF or as a Flash file, with more exporting options to come. This is really exciting, because it shows that Adobe has integrated Macromedia enough that it can already generate Flash content within their applications. This is one feature I am going to extensively test.

There are two sets of image-editing tools. The Quick Develop palette allows for general brightness, contrast and exposure tweaks and seem to work okay for slide shows and other on-screen displays. There is a full Develop section in Lightroom; unfortunately, Jardine’s video didn’t cover it. Given that I blasted Aperture for failing to support the professional photographer with high-end color-correction tools, I am dying to see what Lightroom, created by the company that brought us Photoshop, will offer us.

Lightroom suffers from “interface envy.” It used to be that Adobe’s interface design was the model to strive for, and companies like Macromedia followed its style of tabbed palettes and smart settings placement. But it’s clear that Apple’s interface designs are what’s hot, and Lightroom has followed suit—this application looks far more like Aperture than like Photoshop or any other Adobe application. Slick black backgrounds, sliders, a lack of tabs and clean design make this look almost like an Apple application.

You can print multiple images, but Photoshop’s been doing this for years with the Picture Package. The Lightroom strategists believe that users will need to print their photos either as picture packages, the kind that come home with your child after school pictures have been taken, or as contact sheets (which makes a lot more sense). It looks like there’s some good control over color management and resolution in this part of Lightroom, and there is also a draft printing mode that takes advantage of rendering already done in Lightroom in order to process images quickly and still print at high-quality. Sounds good, but I am still trying to decide just what professional photographers want to do in Aperture or Lightroom: publish books and websites (as Aperture users can do) or print groups of photos at home (which is what Lightroom users can do, and that’s about all they can do). If you’re a pro photographer, write in and let us know what you think the perfect photo organization tool would do.

Jardine ends the video with a comment that the beta process truly makes Lightroom an application “by photographers, for photographers.” It’s ironic that the marketing for Aperture said exactly the same thing. With the number of big-time photo organization applications now increased from zero to two in the course of a couple months, who will win this fight?