Lightroom Windows beta now available

JMcL

From here.

Now all I need to do is upgrade to XP, or steal my wife's laptop

Morlar

Cheers for the link - that should be good. I tried it from home this morning before work and it was timing out. Will grab it later though.

CONMIKE12

Thanks for the link Jm,looks very interesting D loading it now.

Roen

Bet me too it!

JMcL

It looks to be a complete pig from first reactions on the forums, not that I can probably even try it. Doesn't work on W2k which rules out my ageing desktop, and needs 768Mb RAM which also rules out my wife's laptop . ARGGGHHH...

I was really wanting to hold out for a hardware upgrade until Vista arrives, as I don't want to pay the Beast for XP now, and then again for Vista next year. Ah well, maybe I'll just give them a chance to get rid of the bugs and work on performance a bit

Oriel

Can you take the "Windows" out of the subject please? It's available for Mac too.

joolsveer

I've had a quick look at it. What does it do that PS CS2 doesn't already do?

JMcL

sinecurea wrote:

Can you take the "Windows" out of the subject please? It's available for Mac too.

It's been available for Mac for some months now. It's just become available for Windows today, which is why it's worthy of mention, also because it's of interest to anybody that was using Pixmantec's RawShooter, which was Windows only, and for whom Lightroom is now the logical way forward. I've no intention of starting or participating in any Mac better than Windows or vice versa arguments, they're about as pointless as Canon better than Nikon (though of course the last statement is true ), at the end of the day they're all just tools to get a job done, and each has it's advantages/disadvantages.

mloc

just installed it... really wish i had a faster CPU, the "working" notice comes up far too much for my liking. has potential tho.

Morlar

I have heard that its a bit of a resource hog too - I will still give it a shot though to see if its workable on my machine. They may even patch it at some point if they get enough complaints.

antifuse

mloc wrote:

just installed it... really wish i had a faster CPU, the "working" notice comes up far too much for my liking. has potential tho.

IE all the damn time? It takes 7 seconds for it to apply a white balance setting to my image (P4 2.5ghz, 1.5 gb ram). The thing is a PIG, and so I'm heading back to Rawshooter. It really shouldn't need to be using 125mb of ram to edit a 5mb NEF file (for which Rawshooter uses less than 20mb).

Roen

For a 7.5Mb download is seems to be very sloppily programmed if it's using that much juice.
I've got 2Gb of fast ram in my 3.0Ghz desktop and it still takes it's time doing anything. RawShooter kicks it's ass big time.
I know it's only beta at this stage but it looks like Adobe have a hell of a way to go yet. I only hope that some of the technology that Pixmantec used will be incorporated into the final release rather than Adobe just accquiring the company to kill off some competition.

Fenster

I wasn't really impressed with Lightroom when I tried it on my laptop. It was buggy, prone to crash, hogged memory like nothing else and rather than leaving files I added where they were, it copied them to its own library, which bloated its HD usage.

Of all programs, I downloaded Picasa for the first time a few days ago and I've been very happy with it so far.

Roen

Just finished monitoring it after five minutes minimal usage, i.e. importing 40 files and processing two. Memory usage was from between 350Mb and 750Mb. Wtf is that all about? Some fancy graphics and physics app wouldn't do that!

JMcL

Somewhat encouraging from the performance perspective is this post on the Luminous Landscape forum. Hopefully the Pixmantec guys may make a contribution to making it a bit more akin to RSE/P in speed

antifuse

That *is* very encouraging, but frankly it's still a BIT ridiculous. Nobody is going to beta test it for you if it's unusable (which it is for me. I want to see the results of changes I make immediately, or at least quickly.), and people are going to be less likely to buy it if the only thing we hear about it is that "Sweet jesus it's a resource hog, and basically unusable"