Adobe Refreshes Lightroom Beta

Adobe issued an update to its Lightroom professional photographer workflow software on Tuesday. The third release of the beta includes several features requested by testers, including the addition of a tool that helps users keep track of changes made to photos.

Lightroom is currently only available as a free download for the Macintosh, however Adobe says it plans to offer a Windows version in a future beta. The software could be considered a competitor to Apple's Aperture photo application, which the company released in October of last year.

Beta 3 features improvements to export size and resolution control, as well as metadata features. A new preview tool called Before and After will help the user track edits and preview future proposed changes. A new straighten tool has also been added to handle camera angle problems in photos.

Better support for PSD and TIFF files, and black point compensation during printing are other improved features of the beta. Web users will find the HTML/Flash Web output feature helpful, as it offers live previews of imagery for those applications, Adobe said.

Importing has been made easier through the support of automatic import and hot folders. Users would be able to select a directory and have images within those folders automatically added without user interaction.

Additional enhancements included in the beta include the saving of module settings with collections and shoots, keyword import and export, the ability to specify a custom order for images in collections of shots, and more filtering options.

Those interested in the beta can learn more about the application from the Lightroom project Web site. The software requires Mac OS X 10.4.3 on either an Intel or PowerPC processor of 1GHz or faster with 768MB of RAM.