Adobe Lightroom? Or dim bulb

It's often the case that a public beta is released for two key reasons. 1) To broaden the scope of feature testing to determine if elements are missing or combersome for end uers and 2) to draw interest to the product from their most likely target audience.

Adobe's recent release of the beta 3 of their Lightroom application is something of a mixed bag in my view. While the application organizes most of the filters that photographer would use to handle touch-ups, this early code appears to be lacking heavily in performance. Testing both the Mac version and the PC version I noticed that neither of my systems was really chugging along at a speed that I found comfortable. My underpowered Mac PowerBook 1.6Ghz Mac OS 10.3 box would take a considerable amount of time just applying a sepia tone. The same photograph showed little/no improvement on my PC (AMD 3500+, 2GB of RAM) Given that my PC system actually meets the requirements you'd think I'd be doing a little better than an underpowered PowerBook.

The layout is easy to use, and folks familiar with Aperture or PhotoShop will have very little problems finding the basics. Now granted the installation packages were VERY small, which means there probably isn't a lot of optimized code and they kept the beta limited to just what they really needed to for test purposes.

A cursory glance at the Adobe site doesn't lend much information as to the actual price point however. I find that a little disappointing. If the product is very affordable I cann imagine that even with its slow process power, the utility could provide a good low-end option for folks with specific photoediting needs. Then again if the application is priced for "pros" I don't know how well received it will be. Here's to keeping my fingers crossed for a low-end product.