Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.0 Beta Now Publically Available
It was only a matter of time - Adobe Systems has countered Apple's release of Aperture 2 by offering a beta version of its upcoming competitor for anyone to download. The original beta testing program leading up to the release of Photoshop Lightroom 1.0 was a huge success by gathering useful user feedback while introducing digital photographers to a new breed of image processing tools.
Although it carries the Photoshop branding, Lightroom is mostly clean-room a implementation borrowing some concepts from Adobe Bridge and reusing the Camera Raw engine. The original beta release of Photoshop Lightroom (called just Lightroom at the time) also trailed the first release of Apple's Aperture. Both have completely redefined the "digital darkroom" by offering a streamlined solution for digital photographers, although arguably Lightroom has had a bigger impact by reaching both Mac and Windows users.
Notably, the Lightroom 2.0 beta adds two much-requested capabilities: multi-monitor support and localized adjustments. The former has always been present in Apple's offering, while the latter was recently introduced in Aperture 2.1. Apple still has an important advantage in that it offers 3rd party plugin SDK which allows independent developers to offer their image processing add-ons. For virtually all photographers, this would mean that the need to occasionally switch to a more powerful program such as Adobe's Photoshop CS3 for a small subset of retouching features is now eliminated.
So have a look at the release notes, and get downloading! More impressions to follow soon.