Features

Adobe Lightroom Opens Its Windows

By Indu Britto

Adobe's competitor product to Apple's Aperture now has a public beta for the Windows platform. Adobe's release of a version for Mac earlier this year saw over 3,000 beta testers actively participating in the Lightroom beta for Macintosh forums. "[...] we’re looking forward to extending this invaluable dialogue to the Windows community. Cross-platform support gives us the unique opportunity to incorporate feedback from the entire photographic community, ensuring that everyone can participate in the beta process.", said Kevin Connor, senior director of product management for Digital Imaging at Adobe.

The Windows version of Lightroom has a feature set that is somewhat different from the Macintosh version, but Adobe hopes to converge the feature set as the beta for each platform evolves. Lightroom Windows beta 3 is feature compatible with Mac beta 3. However, there are some exceptions and those features not included in Lightroom Windows beta 3 are listed below:

Web module
Identity Plates
Lights Out functionality
Automatic detection of cameras and memory cards for import
Music for Slideshows

In addition, the printing color management is not optimized yet, so while your images will print reasonably well, the color may be off. Add to that, high ASCII and double byte support is not fully enabled. The Lightroom team has also gone on record to say that performance goals on Windows has not yet been reached.

Lightroom is being designed and tested for Windows XP, the current Microsoft operating system. If you are curious about whether Lightroom will run on Vista, Adobe has this to say, "Although we are not aware of any reason why Lightroom would not run on Windows Vista, Vista is an unreleased product and we have yet to evaluate final compatibility.

In the future, Adobe plans to release a developer SDK for Lightroom, so that third parties can create additional modules that extend the application and the workflow.

So, if you are running Windows XP with Service Pack 2 (SP2), an Intel Pentium 4 processor, 768 MB of RAM (1 GB recommended), and 1 GB or more free hard drive space, and a monitor with 1,024 x 768 screen resolution, head over to their download page, and give it a whirl, while Lightroom engineers get back to work on new features for beta 4.


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