The wraps are off. Adobe have announced that on the 27th March they will reveal what’s in the box of the new Creative Suite (it’s the announcement of an announcement day). Adobe have also announced that Photoshop CS3 will be available in two different flavors - Standard and Extended. Click on the following link for more information.

 

 

What is available now is Photoshop Lightroom 1.0. I have been using the Version 1.0 now for some weeks and I have to admit this software keeps making me grin. Scrolling with my my mouse and watching full screen previews fly past my unbelieving eyes is something that will take some getting used to.

 

I have been using Lightroom on my 2 GHz Intel Core Duo Mac laptop and the speed is truly amazing. Lightroom has let me set up my own workflow whereby I load files from my 2 Gigbyte Flash card into the Lightroom library (building thumbnails and full screen previews). The files are copied onto my external pocket drive as DNG files, batch renamed with the shoot location and date and I am able to assign my metadata template and keywords at the time of import. I have decided to adopt a workflow that does NOT keep the images on my laptop hard drive (thus preventing the hard drive from becoming full in a matter of weeks). I can, however, still view the full screen previews when the external drive is disconnected. Once the external drive is reconnected I can edit non-destructively with remarkable speed. Most of the adjustment controls are very intuitive and the ability to click and drag inside the image window to adjust a target hue, saturation or luminance value is such as great idea. Even the histogram is interactive by clicking a range of tones and then dragging left or right to modify the tonality of the image. It is then just a simple matter of clicking multiple images and pressing the sync button to apply these changes to the rest of the shoot. The Raw engine in Lightroom is the same as the one used in the new CS3 so any changes made to an image in the Lightroom interface can also be seen in Adobe Camera Raw dialog box. This final point makes Lightroom the obvious, or indeed the only, choice of digital asset management software that I would want to choose for my own photographic workflow. The best image (the pick) from the shoot will inevitably still pass through Adobe Camera Raw on its way to the main editing space of Photoshop CS3. You can of course open images directly from Lightroom into any editing program of your choice but my own CS3 smart object workflow will require images to pass through the ACR workspace.

 

I think Lightroom and CS3 together are great individually but just about damned near perfect together. A job well done Adobe.

 

Mark