Adobe Lightroom Public Beta for Windows Now Available

Mac users have had the privilage of working with Adobe’s next generation photo management solution, Lightoom, for quite some time, but today Adobe has finally released the public beta for Windows-based platforms.  Adobe recently acquired Pixmantec’s RawShooter product to incorporate into Lightroom, primarily for their excellent Raw workflow.  Although this beta is not feature complete, and numerous known issues abound, this is still a great chance to look at, and help shape with your feedback, the future of Adobe’s photo management products.

The Adobe Lightroom beta is a new, exciting product built from the ground up for professional photographers. It is an efficient, powerful way to import, select, develop and showcase large volumes of digital images. It allows you to spend less time sorting and organizing images, so you have more time to actually shoot and perfect them. The Lightroom beta program aims to get direct product feedback from the photography community, via our new Adobe Labs web site, so that photographers will have an impact in what Adobe actually ships.

Known issues, missing features, and other miscellaneous errata after the jump.

Known Issues for beta 3

Lightroom Windows beta 3 is feature compatible with Mac beta 3. However, there are some exceptions:

* No Web module
* No Identity Plates
* No Lights Out functionality
* No automatic detection of cameras and memory cards for import
* No Music for Slideshows
* Printing color management is not optimized yet. While your images will print reasonably well, the color may be off
* High ASCII and Double Byte support is not fully enabled

General

* Lightroom for Windows currently needs to be run from inside an English language environment.
* Thumbnail building uses all available processor capacity.
* Cannot shift-tab backwards through fields.
* Edit Capture Time does not display the date.
* Time on files created for Edit in Photoshop is off by 7 hours.
* Edit in Photoshop from Lightroom does not show an error dialog if a file cannot be opened. This is caused by having an older version of the Camera Raw plug-in (i.e. Version 3.0x113). Please visit the following link to update the Camera Raw plug-in: http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/cameraraw.html
* If you have images in a read-only location, Lightroom will not inform you of a failure to write out sidecar files.
* Updating of the main window, especially when dragging another window on top of Lightroom, doesn’t happen immediately.

Import

* To Import PSD files you need to save the file in Photoshop with “Maximize Compatibility” turned on.
* Text is cut off on the Shoot popup menu.
* 8 bit TIFF files with JPEG compression may appear pixilated in Lightroom.
* “Progressive” format JPEG files have a black line along the bottom of image.
* TIFF files saved as “Packbits” are not supported in Lightroom.
* Some layered TIFF files with a top adjustment layer show incorrectly (gray stripes).
* CMYK files will not import into Lightroom at this time.

Export

* Using a very long filename (i.e., greater than 200 or so characters) in the Export Rename dialog may cause the “overwrite” dialog to come up

Library

* There are cases of excessive redrawing of the UI
* Images may not be in correct time-lapse order in Library.

Slideshow

* Exporting a Slideshow to PDF can take a long time, especially if more than 50 images are selected. Don’t attempt to use the exported PDF file until the Activity Window is empty. The progress bar on the task erroneously shows 100% complete, instead of progressing while the task is working.

Print

* Printing using the Managed by Printer setting can produce incorrect colors at this time.

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