Digital Home Thoughts: Wired's First Look at Photoshop Lightroom

"Digital imaging software traditionally falls into two categories: applications for cataloging and organizing your photos and more powerful applications for editing individual images. Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 1.0, released this week after a year in beta development, straddles these two categories. In fact, it is part of a new breed of pro-sumer application -- RAW workflow software. Photographers use the RAW file format to capture image data in its purest, least processed form. Most consumer cameras compress or slightly tweak a photo as soon as it's shot, and RAW skips this step. The file sizes of RAW images are larger and the photos don't look as "finished," but working with RAW files also offers more control over the final product. Needless to say, RAW appeals to professionals and photo geeks, but hardly anyone else."



So everyone's (or at least mine :)) first question when looking at this software is if this is a Photoshop killer and it makes sense that Adobe would not make software that competes with one of its flagships. Lightroom is aimed squarely at users of the RAW file format. While Lightroom can handle other formats, it's probably overkill for the casual user. Lightroom costs $300, but Adobe is offering an introductory price of $200 through April 30, 2007.