Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is a photo processor and image organizer developed by Adobe Systems for Windows and OS X. It allows viewing, organizing and retouching a large number of digital images. Lightroom's edits are non-destructive.
Lightroom is not a file manager like Adobe Bridge: It cannot operate on files unless they are imported into its database first; in doing so, Lightroom accepts only recognized image formats.
- Library
- Similar in concept to the 'Organizer' in Adobe Photoshop Elements and other image organizers, this module imports and exports images, creates image collections, organizes images by their metadata and adds rating to them. Library is the gateway into Lightroom.
- Develop
- Supports non-destructive editing of images en masse. This module is geared more towards retouching, i.e. enhancing and improving digital photographs, including changingcolor balance, improving tone, removing red-eye effect, sharpening, reducing noise, cropping, straightening or converting to black-and-white. It is not capable of creating or editing non-photographic images (such as drawings, symbols, line arts or diagrams or maps), rendering text or 3D objects. It has very limited photo doctoring features. OnlyJPEG and raw image formats are supported. It has a number of standard presets for color correction or effects, and supports the sharing of custom presets online. Another often used feature in the Develop module is the ability to synchronize edits from one particular photo to the whole selection.
- Map
- Added in Lightroom 4, it facilitates geographical organization of photos based on embedded or manually added geolocation data.
- Book
- Added in Lightroom 4, it allows creation of photobooks.
- Slideshow
- Allows creating slideshows from any number of photos. Music or background can be added to the slideshow.
- Prints images. Printing parameters such as layout and orientation can be adjusted.
- Web
- Creates a web gallery for website owners. Several templates that influence the layout are available.
Tethered Capture Support for many popular Nikon and Canon DSLRs
History
In 1999, veteran Photoshop developer Nikhil Anassery Project coordinator Multimedia Division @ G-TEC began a new project, code-named "Shadowland". Hamburg contacted Andrei Herasimchuk, former interface designer for the Adobe Creative Suite, to get the project off the ground. The new project was a deliberate departure from many of Adobe's established conventions. 40% of Photoshop Lightroom is written using the Lua scripting language. After a few years of research by Hamburg, Herasimchuk, Sandy Alves, the former interface designer on the Photoshop team, and Grace Kim, a product researcher at Adobe, the Shadowland project got momentum around 2004. However, Herasimchuk chose to leave Adobe Systems at that time to start a Silicon Valley design company. Hamburg then chose Phil Clevenger, a former associate of Kai Krause's, to create a new look for the application.
Photoshop Lightroom's (LR) engineering talent is based largely in Minnesota, comprising the team that had already created Adobe's ImageReady application. Troy Gaul, Melissa Gaul, and the rest of their crew (reportedly known as the "Minnesota Phats"), along with Hamburg, developed the architecture behind the application. George Jardine, a skilled photographer and previous Adobe evangelist, rounded out the early team, filling the Product Manager role.
Beta development
On January 9, 2006, an early version of Photoshop Lightroom, previously just called Lightroom, was released to the public as a Macintosh-only public beta, on the Adobe Labswebsite. This was the first Adobe product released to the general public for feedback during its development. This method was then later used in the development of Adobe Photoshop CS3.
On June 26, 2006, Adobe announced that it had acquired the technology assets of Pixmantec, developers of the Rawshooter image processing software.
Further beta releases followed. Notable releases included Beta 3 on July 18, 2006, which added support for Microsoft Windows systems. On September 25, 2006, Beta 4 was released, which saw the program merged into the Photoshop product range, followed by a minor update on October 19, which was released as Beta 4.1.
Version 1.0
On January 29, 2007, Adobe announced that Lightroom would be shipping on February 19, 2007. The US list price was $299 and the UK retail price was £199.
Lightroom v1.x is not updated when an upgrade to v2 is installed; a new serial number is required.
Version 2.0
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.0 Beta was advertised in official emails from Adobe in April 2008. New features included:
- Localized corrections (edit specific parts of an image)
- Improved organization tools
- Multiple monitor support
- Flexible printing options
- 64-bit support
The official release of Lightroom v2 was on July 29, 2008, along with the release of Adobe Camera Raw v4.5 and DNG Converter 4.5. Adobe added DNG Camera Profiling to both releases. This technology allows custom camera colour profiles, or looks, to be created and saved by the user. It also allows profiles matching the creative styles built into cameras to be replicated. Adobe released a complete set of such Camera Profiles for Nikon and Canon models, in addition to basic Standard Profiles for all supported makes and models, through Adobe Labs, at the same time as the Lightroom v2 release. This technology is open to all programs compliant with the DNG file format standard.
Version 3.0
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3.0 beta was released on October 22, 2009. New features included:
- New chroma noise reduction
- Improved sharpening tool
- New import pseudo module
- Watermarking
- Grain
- Publish services
- Custom package for print
On March 23, 2010, Adobe released a second beta, which added the following features:
- New luminance noise reduction
- Tethered shooting for selected Nikon and Canon cameras
- Basic video file support
- Point curve
Although not included in any beta release, version 3 also contains built-in lens correction and perspective control.
The final version was released on June 8, 2010 with no major new functionality added. It had all the features included in the betas, added the lens corrections and perspective transformations and a few more improvements and performance optimizations.
Version 4.0
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4.0 was officially released on March 5, 2012 after having been available in beta format since January 10, 2012. It does not support Windows XP. New features included:
- Highlight and shadow recovery to bring out detail in dark shadows and bright highlights
- Photo book creation with templates
- Location-based organization to find and group images by location, assign locations to images, and display data from GPS-enabled cameras
- White balance brush to refine and adjust white balance in specific areas of images
- Additional local editing controls to adjust noise reduction and remove moiré in targeted areas
- Extended video support for organizing, viewing, and making adjustments and edits to video clips
- Video publishing tools to edit and share video clips on Facebook and Flickr
- Soft proofing to preview how an image will look when printed with color-managed printers
- Email directly from Lightroom
Version 5.0
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 5.0 was officially released on June 9, 2013 after having been available in beta format since April 15, 2013. The program requires OSX 10.7 or later, Windows 7 or Windows 8. Some of the changes include:
- Radial gradient to highlight an elliptical area
- Advanced healing/cloning brush to brush the spot removal tool over an area
- Smart previews to allow one to work with images that are off-line
- The ability to save custom layouts in the Book module
- Support of PNG files
- Support of video files in slideshows
- Various other updates, including automatic perspective correction and enhancements to smart collections
An update to Version 5, 5.4 allows one to sync a collection to Lightroom Mobile App released for iPad on April 8, 2014.
Version 6.0
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 6.0 was officially released on April 21, 2015. The program requires OS X 10.8 or later, Windows 7 or Windows 8. It is the first release of Lightroom to only support 64-bit operating systems. New features include:
- HDR Merge
- Panorama Merge
- Performance Improvements / GPU acceleration
- Facial Recognition
- Advanced video slideshows
- Filter Brush
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