Adobe announced that its digital photo management tool, Photoshop Lightroom, has finished its beta phase and will begin shipping in mid-February. Version 1.0 costs $300, but Adobe is offering it at an introductory price of $200 through 30-Apr-07, no doubt to win over photographers trying to decide between it and Apple's Aperture.

In addition to becoming a full release, Photoshop Lightroom 1.0 incorporates advanced keywording tools in the Library module, an improved import dialog, and a Key Metadata Browser for locating images easily. The Develop model introduces Virtual Copies and Snapshot tools for working on multiple versions of a photo without saving multiple copies on disk. Adobe also added tools for cloning and healing images at the pixel level, in addition to a Hue, Saturation, and Luminance tool for tweaking colors.

Photoshop Lightroom requires Mac OS X 10.4.3 or later, a 1 GHz PowerPC G4 processor or faster (including Intel-based Macs, since the program is a universal binary), at least 768 MB of RAM, and a minimum screen resolution of 1024 by 768. The beta 4.1 version of Lightroom is still available for download, and expires on 28-Feb-07.