I’ve been listening to an awful lot of photography podcasts in the last couple of months. More than any sane man should do.

The one thing that I always find fun is hearing opinions from a year ago — or even six months ago — that have completely changed in the present. The best example I can give of this is Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. When it first came out as a public beta a year ago, people complained that it was slow, that it was a hobbled version of Photoshop, that it didn’t really fit in, and what can it do that Aperture can’t?

Of course, this was only the beta. By the time the product was released this past spring — and the subsequent major .1 revision followed shortly — I’m sure it was a different program. Ask any Lightroom book author. They all had to rewrite their books two and three times between the first beta and the final release.

I don’t point this out to laugh at those who were wrong or who didn’t have a clue. They were honest and forthright in their opinion. Subsequent marketing and fine-tuning of the product helped to reshape opinion. Perhaps due to its connections to the industry-standard Photoshop (it was added to the official product title at release), it’s been adopted by a large number of photographers, both pro and amateur. One recent survey has it at greater popularity to Aperture now.

One has to wonder what Apple is doing about an Aperture 2.0 right now. Lightroom is the first serious contender in that space for Apple, and Aperture is looking old and creaky. It needs an update. I suspect we’ll see one in the months ahead and I suspect it’ll require Leopard’s built-in graphics handling whizbang features to work.

Lightroom has single-handedly change my attitude and perspective on photography. It’s Photoshop for the rest of us, and may even prove to be the open door into Photoshop, an otherwise large and scary program that I just don’t comprehend. (I can do Illustrator. Photoshop baffles me.)

Rambling, rambling, rambling.

Happy NaBloWriMo!

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 8th, 2007 at 7:27 am and is filed under Photography, Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.