Lightroom

I’m quite digging Adobe’s new Lightroom app. It’s their newey for competing with iPhoto/Aparture/Picasa. There’s a free public beta, no strings. With it being the first beta there are some major bugs, and there aren’t any tools for such things as cropping, which I hope will be introduced later on. Anyway I absolutely love the interface, it reminds me of Ableton Live, which also has an interface i love. You can switch between different screen layouts using hotkeys, so that you can get a nice view of the photo whilst you’re doing things and just see the tools that you need at the time, whilst being minimalist in design, mostly black so that your photo’s are always the most prominent thing on your monitor. It’s also fast, even on my iBook, much much faster than iPhoto at switching between photo’s. Also better than iPhoto, it lets you choose what you do with importing photo’s, copy them to it’s own folder or keep them where they are. Please apple, will you do the same? There’s mucho colour tools and a lot of them I don’t even understand, so a bit of experimenting may be needed there. But all in all it’s looking good. I don’t know what price point it will be when released, i’m hoping it won’t have a pro price tag.