Adobe Lightroom ready for launch

Photoshop Lightroom, the photo file manager from Adobe, is now available for preorder, the company announced on Monday.

Adobe's photo-management software, which has been in beta for months for Windows users and since 2005 for Mac OS users, is scheduled to begin shipping in mid-February.

Lightroom is a file management tool intended to complement photo-editing software such as Adobe's Photoshop. It enables photographers to import, minimally edit, manage and output batches of large digital photo files rather than having to deal with each file individually.

It's a direct competitor to Apple's Aperture 1.5 software, which currently sells for £219.

Lightroom will sell at the Adobe store for £147 in the UK until 30 April, according to Adobe. After that, it will be sold for about £206. The public beta version is set to expire on 28 February.

About 500,000 photographers participated in the public beta evaluation, and the company made changes based on their feedback, Adobe said in a statement.

Compared to the beta 4.1 version, Lightroom 1.0 has new keyword and metadata browsing tools for searching or filtering massive collections of digital-image files. The Key Metadata Browser incorporates colour labels and a pick-or-reject system, while the import dialogue box in the library module yields more file location choices when importing files, according to Adobe.

Lightroom supports more than 150 raw file formats, including those for the new Nikon D40 and D80 and Pentax K10D, as well as JPEG and TIFF files, according to Adobe.

The software runs natively on both Windows PCs and Intel-based Mac computers, though system requirements for Adobe Lightroom specify processing power, storage space, operating system and screen resolution.