Adobe ships Photoshop Lightroom beta 4

Adobe today announced an update to the public beta of its Lightroom photography software at the Photokina tradeshow in Cologne, Germany. Now called Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, the fourth beta of the product unites the product feature set for Windows and Macintosh platforms, offering professional photographers a new way to import, manage and showcase large volumes of digital photographs. To date, Adobe said more than 325,000 people used Lightroom, since its launch earlier this year. The final release of the software is expected in early 2007; however, the company did not offer details on pricing. Beta 4.0 offers improved digital photography workflow tools, including a precision white balance selection option and a more streamlined and elegant user interface experience with customizable controls. An intuitive new tone curve adjustment feature provides powerful image correction capabilities, allowing users to visually obtain excellent midtone, shadow and highlight adjustments.

"From the moment we introduced Lightroom beta we opened up the process to photographers, making them a part of our 'virtual development team' and allowing them to tell us exactly what this application needs," said Deborah Whitman, vice president of product management for Digital Imaging. "Engaging with this community has helped us build a better workflow solution and has made watching its evolution more exciting and dynamic."

The update also offers enhancements in the Develop and Library modules, including time-saving tools such as the ability to re-name and convert files to Adobe Digital Negative Format (DNG) after importing into the Lightroom library. It also delivers new filters, search presets and organizing options for quick retrieval of images and greater flexibility.

Delivering raw conversion in a single workflow experience, Adobe said that Lightroom supports over 125 native raw file formats--in addition to JPEG and TIFF; it now supports Nikon D2Xs, Sony A100, as well as offers preliminary support for the Canon Digital Rebel XTi (400D) and Nikon D80.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom beta ships as a Universal Binary and is available for free download from Adobe Labs website. The company recommends Mac OSX 10.4.3 and a 1GHz PowerPC G4 processor.

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