Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.0 Public Beta

[Martin_Doudoroff]

The other shoe has dropped, or is at least poised to do so.

The 2.0 beta is now publicly available from Adobe Labs.

John Nack has a good introductory post on his blog, including a small forest of links that lead to related tutorials and articles.

The new features list is very ambitious and indicates that the development team has been listening. Huge kudos to Adobe for returning to the public beta model; I will be surprised if the public beta does not result in a higher quality 2.0 release.

[Jerry Skrocki]

I am looking for a current Adobe Lightroom owner to extend an invitation to me so that I can try the Lightroom 2.0 Beta.

http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/entitle...ghtroom_invite

I received your invite Martin, Thanks!

Jerry

[Martin_Doudoroff]

After tinkering today, my initial impressions about the changes in Lightroom 2.0 BETA are overall quite favorable. It feels exactly like the team made a list, prioritized it, trimmed it down, and then spent a great deal of time trying to execute what was left as well as possible. They didn't do everything that everybody wanted, but they tried to do what they could. Version 2.0 should be a solid-feeling release.

I haven't actually tried printing from Lightroom, yet, but Jerry Skrocki did and got good results. Hopefully he'll report further, here. I'm acutely interested in the output sharpening (assuming it actually works, yet).

Now I gotta get serious about buying that second monitor!

I downloaded it. Haven't had a chance to play with it much.

But it installed and played well with LR1.3 on a 64bit Vista SP1 machine.

[Martin_Doudoroff]

If you wish to participate in the direct feedback discussion with Adobe about Lightroom 2.0, they have set up a separate forum for the process which is not so obvious. Of course, that didn't prevent an heap of sniveling, petulant folk from finding it and whining up a storm over their pet causes.

Perhaps if Adobe charged an annual fee to use its forums that would keep the signal-to-noise ratio up?

[Dennis_Vied]

I downloaded it and tried importing some photos. I'm not able to see any great leap forward as I presume that will come with 64-bit technology, which I don't have. I did notice the Plug-In Manager. Any info on plug-ins available yet?

[Martin_Doudoroff]

Originally Posted by Dennis_Vied

I did notice the Plug-In Manager. Any info on plug-ins available yet?

Lightroom 1.x supports "export" plug-ins (automation exporters to flickr and stuff like that). I haven't heard a peep about any expansion of the SDK for Lightroom 2.x.

Frankly, if the best they can come up with is something like what Apple did with Aperture 2, then I might just assume they leave the plug-ins to Photoshop. You know, maintain a clean separation of church and state.