| Tuesday, January 10, 2006 |
15:10 - So what the heck is Lightroom?
http://photoshopnews.com/2006/01/09/the-shadowlandlightroom-development-story/
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Via Daring Fireball:
The development of Adobe Lightroom, code named Shadowland, was not something Adobe started after Apple announced Aperture. The Shadowland project has been going on for years.
How do I know that Adobe has been working on Shadowland for so long?
Because that’s how long I’ve been working on it.
And yet it's still odd that it should be announced today—and as a free public beta—which is Mac-only. That's some set of coincidences.
Lightroom looks to have a somewhat less ambitious mission than Aperture—its "loupe" view doesn't amount to anything more than a preview box that you drag over a thumbnail, like in Photoshop, as opposed to the trick circular "magnifying glass" loupe in Aperture that can magnify anything in the workspace or filmstrip, and the "light table" functions are actually rather rudimentary. There's a "Compare" view that lets you see several pictures side by side, tiling them neatly and smoothly to fit into place, but that's nothing that Exposé can't already do. Aperture's claim on the ultra-flexible stack-based digital light table still seems to be inviolate.
But then again, Lightroom runs perfectly happily on my three-year-old (!) G5 and 22-inch monitor, with no slowdowns or other indications that it was breathing hard. From what I've seen I don't think it would be a good idea to approach Aperture without a tiger-training chair in one hand and a quad-2.7GHz G5 in the other. It may be another story once it's a native Intel app running on a native Intel Mac, but as of now the useful market for Aperture is rather rarefied, and the people who don't own top-end Macs and/or who are scared off by all the negative press might find that Lightroom does the job quite handily.
Here's a detailed review of Lightroom by Michael Reichmann. I don't know if I'll have the time or expertise to really provide a good in-depth look, so maybe I'll defer to guys like this on such matters. It's certainly a lot more comprehensive than I'm equipped to be, and it provides a good comparison of Lightroom and Aperture for anyone curious about how they stack up.
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Brian Tiemann
