Okay, I’ve got to do this post just to be official…Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is now officially available. I’ve been using it more and more over the past few months and am really enjoying it. It’s much more modal than Aperture, which I also have and was using because it handles RAW much better than iPhoto and integrates well with the iLife apps (which I find myself using less and less each passing month). But Aperture, running on my Dual 2Ghz G5 with 3 GB of RAM, is very slow. Sure, I have the bare minimum in terms of supported video card, but I’m not about to go drop $300 on a new video card to make it faster.
Lightroom on the other hand, runs quite nicely on the same system. I like Aperture’s non-modal approach better and I think they’ve got the whole versioning thing down better than Lightroom currently does, but I just can’t get past the performance on my not-that-old system. Someday, I’ll upgrade to an Intel-Mac at home, but just yet. I’m spending my money these days on upgrading my lenses (specifically the Canon EF 24-105 f4/L IS and the 70-200 f4/L IS).
Anyway, Photoshop Lightroom is shipping and if you’re so inclined, it’s available for a $100 discount ($199 intro pricing). Check out the demo if you haven’t played with the beta yet.
