Adobe Photoshop Lightroom

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom
Developer(s) Adobe Systems
Stable release 6.5 / March 16, 2016 (2016-03-16)
Written in C++, Lua
Operating system Windows, OS X
Type Image organizer, digital image processing
License Trialware
Website www.adobe.com/products/photoshop-lightroom.html

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom (commonly referred to as Lr) is a photo processor and image organizer developed by Adobe Systems for Windows and OS X. It allows viewing, organizing and retouching a large number of digital images.[1] Lightroom's edits are non-destructive. However, despite sharing its name with Adobe Photoshop, it is incapable of performing many Photoshop functions such as doctoring (adding, removing or altering the appearance of individual image items), rendering text or 3D objects on images or modifying individual video frames.

Lightroom is not a file manager like Adobe Bridge: It cannot operate on files unless they are imported into its database first; in doing so, Lightroom accepts only recognized image formats.

Lightroom is written in the C++ programming language and Lua.

Overview

Lightroom is focused on the following workflow steps:

Library
Similar in concept to the 'Organizer' in Adobe Photoshop Elements and other image organizers, this module imports and exports images, creates image collections, organizes images by their metadata and adds rating to them. Library is the gateway into Lightroom.
Develop
Supports non-destructive editing of images en masse. This module is geared more towards retouching, i.e. enhancing and improving digital photographs, including changing color balance, improving tone, removing red-eye effect, sharpening, reducing noise, cropping, straightening or converting to black-and-white. It is not capable of creating or editing non-photographic images (such as drawings, symbols, line arts or diagrams or maps), rendering text or 3D objects. It has very limited photo doctoring features. Only JPEG and raw image formats are supported. It has a number of standard presets for color correction or effects, and supports the sharing of custom presets online. Another often used feature in the Develop module is the ability to synchronize edits from one particular photo to the whole selection.
Map
Added in Lightroom 4, it facilitates geographical organization of photos based on embedded or manually added geolocation data.
Book
Added in Lightroom 4, it allows creation of photobooks.
Slideshow
Allows creating slideshows from any number of photos. Music or background can be added to the slideshow.
Print
Prints images. Printing parameters such as layout and orientation can be adjusted.
Web
Creates a web gallery for website owners. Several templates that influence the layout are available.

Tethered Capture Support for many popular Nikon and Canon DSLRs[2]

History

Lightroom release timeline

In 1999, veteran Photoshop developer Mark Hamburg began a new project, code-named "Shadowland". Hamburg contacted Andrei Herasimchuk, former interface designer for the Adobe Creative Suite, to get the project off the ground.[3] The new project was a deliberate departure from many of Adobe's established conventions. 40% of Photoshop Lightroom is written using the Lua scripting language. After a few years of research by Hamburg, Herasimchuk, Sandy Alves, the former interface designer on the Photoshop team, and Grace Kim, a product researcher at Adobe, the Shadowland project got momentum around 2004. However, Herasimchuk chose to leave Adobe Systems at that time to start a Silicon Valley design company. Hamburg then chose Phil Clevenger, a former associate of Kai Krause's, to create a new look for the application.[3]

Photoshop Lightroom's (LR) engineering talent is based largely in Minnesota, comprising the team that had already created Adobe's ImageReady application. Troy Gaul, Melissa Gaul, and the rest of their crew (reportedly known as the "Minnesota Phats"[4]), along with Hamburg, developed the architecture behind the application. George Jardine, a skilled photographer and previous Adobe evangelist, rounded out the early team, filling the Product Manager role.[3]

Beta development

On January 9, 2006, an early version of Photoshop Lightroom, previously just called Lightroom, was released to the public as a Macintosh-only public beta, on the Adobe Labs website. This was the first Adobe product released to the general public for feedback during its development. This method was then later used in the development of Adobe Photoshop CS3.

On June 26, 2006, Adobe announced that it had acquired the technology assets of Pixmantec, developers of the Rawshooter image processing software.[5]

Further beta releases followed. Notable releases included Beta 3 on July 18, 2006, which added support for Microsoft Windows systems. On September 25, 2006, Beta 4 was released, which saw the program merged into the Photoshop product range, followed by a minor update on October 19, which was released as Beta 4.1.

Version 1.0

On January 29, 2007, Adobe announced that Lightroom would be shipping on February 19, 2007. The US list price was $299 and the UK retail price was £199.

Lightroom v1.x is not updated when an upgrade to v2 is installed; a new serial number is required.

Version 2.0

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.0 Beta was advertised in official emails from Adobe in April 2008. New features included:

The official release of Lightroom v2 was on July 29, 2008, along with the release of Adobe Camera Raw v4.5 and DNG Converter 4.5. Adobe added DNG Camera Profiling to both releases. This technology allows custom camera colour profiles, or looks, to be created and saved by the user. It also allows profiles matching the creative styles built into cameras to be replicated. Adobe released a complete set of such Camera Profiles for Nikon and Canon models, in addition to basic Standard Profiles for all supported makes and models, through Adobe Labs, at the same time as the Lightroom v2 release. This technology is open to all programs compliant with the DNG file format standard.

Version 3.0

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3.0 beta was released on October 22, 2009. New features included:[6]

On March 23, 2010, Adobe released a second beta, which added the following features:

Although not included in any beta release, version 3 also contains built-in lens correction and perspective control.[7]

The final version was released on June 8, 2010 with no major new functionality added. It had all the features included in the betas, added the lens corrections and perspective transformations and a few more improvements and performance optimizations.

Version 4.0

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4.0 was officially released on March 5, 2012 after having been available in beta format since January 10, 2012.[8] It does not support Windows XP. New features included:

Version 5.0

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 5.0 was officially released on June 9, 2013 after having been available in beta format since April 15, 2013.[10] The program requires OSX 10.7 or later, Windows 7 or Windows 8. Some of the changes include:

An update to Version 5, 5.4 allows one to sync a collection to Lightroom Mobile App released for iPad on April 8, 2014.

Version 6.0

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 6.0 was officially released on April 21, 2015.[11] The program requires OS X 10.8 or later, Windows 7 or Windows 8. It is the first release of Lightroom to only support 64-bit operating systems. New features include:

Version 6.4

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 6.4 was officially released on January 27, 2016.[12] Like its predecessor, the program requires OS X 10.8 or later, Windows 7 (64-bit) or later. The goal of this release is to provide additional camera raw support, lens profile support and address bugs that were introduced in previous releases of Lightroom.

Additionally it contains numerous performance improvements and fixes some bugs present in the import function where folders containing movies could not be properly imported and had to be force quit. It also improves the panorama stitching and includes a new feature called 'boundary warp'.

Market share

According to 2009 statistics from research company InfoTrends, released by Adobe Systems product manager John Nack, of the 1,045 North American professional photographers who were interviewed, 37.0% used Lightroom and 6.3% used Aperture while 57.9% used the Photoshop Camera Raw plug-in. Of the Mac users, 44.4% used Lightroom and 12.5% used Aperture.[13]

See also

References

  1. ↑ What is Lightroom
  2. ↑ "Light Room 3 now supports tethered capture for Nikon D7000". Blog GlamourPhotography.co.
  3. 1 2 3 Jeff Schewe (January 9, 2006). "The Shadowland/Lightroom Development Story". Archived from the original on 11 January 2006. Retrieved 2006-01-09.
  4. ↑ Jeff Schewe (January 9, 2006). "Announcing Adobe Lightroom". Archived from the original on 29 September 2007. Retrieved 2007-09-29.
  5. ↑ Adobe (June 26, 2006). "Adobe buys RawShooter engine". Retrieved 2010-08-23.
  6. ↑ "Lightroom 3 Beta announced". October 22, 2009. Retrieved 2013-06-25.
  7. ↑ "Preview of Lens Correction Solution for Camera Raw 6 and Lightroom 3".
  8. ↑ "Lightroom 4 beta now available".
  9. ↑ "Another lay out for an Amazon Kindle Photo eBook using only Lightroom 4". Blog GlamourPhotography.co.
  10. ↑ "Lightroom 5 now available".
  11. ↑ "Adobe – Creative Cloud Photography update".
  12. ↑ "Adobe – Creative Cloud Photography update".
  13. ↑ Adobe.com

External links

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