Lightroom Featured at Photoshop World Keynote Address

At the Photoshop World Keynote in Las Vegas yesterday, the guest Adobe representatives actually spent the bulk of their time showing the crowd new, cool features of not Photoshop but the "complementary product" designed particularly for photographers, Adobe Lightroom.

After NAPP President Scott Kelby entertained the crowd with a clever CSI send-up (featuring a nefarious act by our own Deke McClelland), he turned the podium over to Adobe's John Loiacono (Senior Vice President, Creative Solutions Business Unit) who spent a few minutes discussing how Photoshop had become a pervasive brand, community, and world experience (demonstrated with clips of referrals to Photoshop in the TV shows "The West Wing" and "Desperate Housewives.") But "Johnny L" (if you can believe Scott Kelby) fairly quickly introduced Adobe's Sr. Director of Product Development for Digital Imaging, Kevin Connor, to give a sneak peek at Lightroom.

Although Lightroom has been in public beta since January (at least for Mac users), "Kevin C" (OK, I made that one up) gave the audience a glimpse at some of the cool features of Beta 4, which is not yet available to the world. Although I was a little surprised that so much time was spent on Lightroom at Photoshop World Keynote, from a raise-of-hands poll conducted by Kevin Conner, hundreds in the audience had already downloaded the beta.

One of those key features is a flexible, customizable interface which allows photographers to choose which tools and metadata they want to see, and hide panels that they don't. But the intriguing new feature to me was a new highlight/shading feature on the Histogram and Curves displays that show you the area that you are affecting as you move a slider. Seems to me this has great feedback potential for helping users (especially new students of digital photography) really understanding how these tools work.

In order to prove that the next round would have parity across platform, he ran it in Windows. He also used some amazing photographs from the Adobe Lightroom Adventure in Iceland to demo how the new interface worked, and both Conner and Loiacono praised the value of having sent real world photographers out to test this tool for "photographers who want the best results."