Adobe Offers Public Beta of Lightroom -- Adobe Systems, Inc. revealed a public beta of their upcoming professional photography workflow software, Lightroom, just before Macworld Expo. (Adobe recently acquired Macromedia, thus the macromedia.com URL.) The company's digital photo manipulation software, which currently requires a PowerPC G4 or G5 processor and at least 512 MB of RAM, will be available later for Windows and for Mac OS X running on Intel hardware. Lightroom appears to be aimed at the same professional photography market as Apple's $500 Aperture software.

<http://labs.macromedia.com/technologies/ lightroom/>
<http://db.tidbits.com/article/08299>
<http://www.apple.com/aperture/>

Included are tools for accomplishing common tasks such as white balance and color correction; support for such typical photography file formats as TIFF, JPEG, RAW, and Photoshop; and a variety of filters such as grayscale and sepia. Users can save presets for frequently used combinations of steps. The current public beta version expires on 30-Jun-06, but the company says later beta releases, which will be announced in the Adobe Labs RSS feeds, will have later expiration dates. [MHA]

<http://labs.macromedia.com/rss_feeds/>