Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.0 BETA promises new and improved functionality. Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is the professional photographers' essential tool for managing, adjusting and presenting large volumes of digital photographs. It will feature many new and exciting features such as dual-monitor support, dodge and burn correction and will support 64 bit Mac OS X 10.5 Intel Macs and Microsoft Vista 64 bit operating systems (A full list of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.0 BETA features can be seen below).
Adobe Lightroom vs. Adobe Bridge. What the difference? Quite simply, Adobe Lightroom and all of its resources were built for the professional photographer with feature rich options that only a photographer could appreciate. It is based on the mindset of a photographer and the post-production process that is taken after the shot is made. A photographer would be able to modify and adjust the setting within the JPEG or RAW file, categorize it, and store it within a few simple clicks.
Adobe Bridge should be perceived as a file browser that has the capabilities of displaying various files formats, anywhere from, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, to Adobe Flash and Adobe After Effects, not to mention, Adobe Premiere, Adobe Encore, Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Dreamweaver, and so on... Adobe bridge is a tool that allows any media designer, videographer, animator to pass files through many applications. Adobe Lightroom does not have this capability.
One more note, Lightroom is a database driven application that allows it to retrieve more data readily about any picture than Adobe bridge. If you are considering to be a photographer, Adobe Photoshop Lightoom is a must have application.
A complete list of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.0 BETA features:
- Layout: The entire Library layout has been revisited to provide a more intuitive image organization experience.
- Collections: The Photoshop Lightroom Collection panel has also received significant attention with the addition of collection sets that allow photographers to create a hierarchy while maintaining collection-specific sort order.
- Smart Collections: Specify the criteria for a smart collection and images will be automatically added to the collection if they meet the criteria.
- Filter Bar: With the source location of the images clearly defined in the left hand panel, the top of the grid view provides a panel that will filter the content.
- Photoshop Integration: Adobe PhotoshopLightroom can now open images directly in Photoshop without writing out TIFF or PSD files first.
- Localized Correction: The develop module now provides the ability to correct specific areas of an image without affecting other areas.
- Vignette: The previous lens correction vignette effect was only applied to the entire image frame and as an artistic effect could be obscured after an image was cropped.
- Basic Panel Keyboard Shortcuts: Photographers who prefer to utilize their keyboards for basic image adjustments will find that the keys are linked to the Exposure adjustment in the Develop module.
- Improved Auto Adjustment: The Auto adjustment has been modified in response to feedback that previous adjustments were too bright.
Current Photoshop Lightroom customers will be able to install and use the program without requiring a serial number. New Lightroom customers will have to install and launch the program as a third party trial. Currently it supports the following file formats: JPEG, TIFF (8 bit, 16 bit), PSD (8 bit, 16 bit), DNG and RAW. However, some of these file formats are not supported in Adobe Lightroom: CMYK Files, PSD files saved without the maximize compatibility setting, files with dimensions greater than 30,000 pixels per side and all video files.
- Adobe Photoshop Tutorials
- Adobe Photoshop Lightroom download: https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/entitlement/index.cfm?e=labs%5Flightroom2
- For the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.0 BETA release notes: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/lightroom/lightroom2_b1_releasenotes.pdf