Follow Up to our Adobe Lightroom Review--A Talk with George Jardine
We posted a favorable review of Lightroom on Monday. It was based on several days use and we have developed several questions since.
Because of the release of Apple's 15" MacBook Pro based on an Intel CPU and Adobe's targeting of Lightroom for the field phoptographer, we were curious about Adobe's schedule for producing a version of Lightroom that will run native on the MacBook Pro. Of course, Adobe has already announced that a Windows version is in the making that will run on Intel's CPU. George said that a Mac OS X Intel version will come out in a future build but that Adobe has no official schedule to announce.
We asked about the public response to the Lightroom Public Beta 1 which has been available as a free download since early Monday. When we spoke with him on Wednesday, he said that 24,000 copies had been downloaded on Monday which had nearly doubled to 45,000 on Tuesday.
George noted that he was very excited about the response but pretty tired because he had been manning the special forums set up for public feedback. He had been discussing Lightroom on the forums virtually non-stop since the public beta was released. While it feels to him like an avalanche, the respose actually has been very strong, steady and manageable so far. He said that it was not unusual to find over 50 people on the forums at 2 am. Users are not just submitting information on bugs, opinions and wishes to Adobe, they are actually getting to dialog with George about their views. This really underscores how serious Adobe is about getting public feedback inorder to get the final application just right.
George said the main positive feature of Lightroom according to the forums is that people really like the simple interface and being able to focus on the photo itself. In addition, the forums have pinpointed a major performance issue with TIFF files that Adobe engineers are working on as a result. What are people are looking for in Lightroom? The consensus is better integration with Bridge and Photoshop, both of which are coming according to George.
Finally, people also really like being able to work with their own organized library of photos rather than having to work with a new, closed database specific to Lightroom.
We appreciate Adobe and George Jardine for giving us the time for this update. [Bill Fox]
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