Adobe: Make room for Photoshop Lightroom
Company's photo-managing software, out of beta and available for preorder, is scheduled to ship sometime in February.
Adobe's photo management software, which has been in beta for months for Windows users and since 2005 for Mac OS users, is scheduled to begin shipping in mid-February.
It is a direct competitor to Apple's Aperture 1.5 software, which currently sells for $299.
Lightroom will sell at the Adobe store for US$199 in the United States and Canada through April 30, according to Adobe. After that, it will be sold for about $299. The public beta version is set to expire February 28.
About 500,000 photographers participated in the public beta evaluation, and the company made changes based on their feedback, Adobe said in a statement.
Compared with the beta 4.1 version, Lightroom 1.0 has new keyword and metadata browsing tools for searching or filtering massive collections of digital-image files. The Key Metadata Browser incorporates color labels and a pick-or-reject system, while the import dialog box in the library module yields more file location choices when importing files, according to Adobe.
Lightroom supports more than 150 raw file formats, including those for the new Nikon D40 and D80 and Pentax K10D, as well as JPEG and TIFF files, according to Adobe.
The software runs natively on Windows PCs and on Mac computers using either Intel or Power processors. System requirements for Adobe Lightroom specify processing power, storage space, operating system and screen resolution.