October 8, 2024

Lightroom will begin shipping and downloading on the 19th as the whole world and his dog know by now. V1.0 is finished and ready for release to a very expectant audience. Not counting multiple downloads, over 570,000 individuals downloaded the Beta’s. That’s a big crowd to have waiting, not to mention the newcomers since the Launch on the 29th January.
I’ve outlined a lot of the new features (but not all) on Lightroom-News.com, but that still won’t satisfy those who want the program now.

If I were seeing the program for the first time since Beta 4.1, I would be over the moon with the new features. The key thing for me that changes the usability of Version 1, is Spot Removal. This brings almost 90% of my workflow into one application. A good sharpening/noise reduction toolset would bring it to 90%. The remaining 10% is for special files (final selects) requiring skin retouching and other layer based edits. Unless someone writes a dedicated retouch module (which is more than possible), then access to Photoshop is always going to be required. I’m very happy that I can now choose to do my Edits as ProPhoto RGB PSD files, rather than Tiff. I prefer using Photoshops’ native format. Lightroom will recognise and show multi-layer PSD files. You need to choose Edit Original though, when going back to Photoshop, or else Lightroom will send out a flattened image. Also Maximize Compatibility must be turned on. All this leaves for me to say is : Roll on the 19th!

3 thoughts on “As we count down.

  1. Andy,
    Noise reduction and sharpening are high on the priority list for the next release. It may even make a dot release.

    Sageone.. I’ve no idea. The offical date is the 19th, which usually mean 00:01 EST on the night of the 18th/19th.

  2. So I take it that the sharpening and noise reduction hasn’t seen much change since 4.1? I never really saw noise reduction do anything to my images, whereas the noise controls in RawShooter Premium were superb. Shame if they haven’t incorporated more of that technology 🙁

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