I suppose this was probably inevitable, sooner or later. Nikon has announced that they’re seriously curtailing their film-based camera business, cutting their film body production back to just the new F6 and the entry-level manual FG10, dropping all but a handful of their manual-focus lenses, and stopping production of things like their large format lenses. Of course there are still tons of usable Nikon film bodies and lenses out on the used market for those who want them, but film seems to be moving higher up the endangered species list every day.

Yesterday, Adobe announced Lightroom, a “professional photographic workflow tool” similar to Apple’s Aperture. It won’t be released for some time, I think, but they released a Mac-only beta when they announced it yesterday. Far more experienced and qualified photographers than myself have weighed in on it, but I thought I’d give my impressions from playing around with the beta.

• This is definitely a beta, nowhere near release quality software. Not only in the sense that it has bugs, but that it’s missing tools (you can’t even crop with it). I’ve actually encountered surprisingly few serious bugs, but I haven’t used it that heavily yet (I only have a hundred or so images imported).
• Something I haven’t seen mentioned elsewhere: This thing really doesn’t like Unsanity’s Application Enhancers. I have ShapeShifter installed on my machine since I’m not a fan of Aqua, and Lightroom was very sluggish in use at first. After adding it to the Master Exclude List in the APE control panel performance jumped up several notches to “tolerable”. (Dual processor 1.8GHz G5 for reference)
• Lightroom doesn’t seem to have the user interface flash that Aperture does. That may come closer to release though. The interface layout seems to be logical and clean, and more streamlined than something like ACR.
• The Grayscale Mixer seems like it will end up being very useful for getting good B&W pictures. I think I like it
• The organization tools seem a bit rudimentary compared to some other apps I’ve used, but I’m quite willing to admit that I just haven’t tried it that extensively.
• I see a couple of major advantages over Aperture right off the bat (at least on paper). First, Lightroom allows you to import your images into its database while leaving the actual files where they’re at on disk; Aperture insists you suck all of the files into its relatively opaque database file. Second, Adobe has said Lightroom will have an extensive plugin architecture by v1.0, which is something that’s helped turn Photoshop into the 800lb. gorilla it is.

It’s definitely good to see some competition in this arena; existing solutions like Photoshop are powerful, but almost too powerful and not streamlined enough for general use. Having several companies will result in better software for less. I’d recommend if you have a Mac and a digital camera (especially one that shoots RAW) to check out the beta.