In the seven years since Adobe launched Lightroom, it's established a devout fanbase of professional and amateur photographers alike. It promised, and delivered, an end-to-end digital imaging workshop that prioritized speed, efficiency, and ease of use. Today, Adobe is launching a free public beta for Lightroom 5, and thankfully, that original vision hasn't gone out of focus. There are a few genuinely new and useful editing features, like an improved spot removal tool (now a brush), and a new automated way to straighten your images, but the core editing functionality has been left untouched since Adobe’s big processing engine update last year. But editing isn't everything. This time around, Adobe is adding a new workflow-related feature called Smart Previews, and if your main computer in the field is a MacBook Air, ultrabook, or anything else with a low-capacity SSD, it could totally change how you work with RAW images.

First, a quick diversion. RAW image formats like Nikon’s NEF, Canon’s CR2, and dozens of others contain the unprocessed (or minimally processed) data coming straight off your camera’s sensor. Many pros and amateurs prefer to work with them over JPEGs because even though they take up an obscene amount of disk space, all of that extra image data gives you a lot more flexibility to make changes. As RAW grew in popularity in the early 2000s, Adobe realized that all these different proprietary formats might not be the best choice for archiving images, so in 2004 it announced an open, uncompressed format called DNG, short for "digital negative." It offered most of the benefits of RAW formats, but since it wasn’t tied to any one manufacturer, there were supposed to be fewer worries about it becoming obsolete. It then expanded on the idea with lossy DNG — a compressed format related to JPEG, but optimized to provide as much RAW-like flexibility as possible. So long as you didn’t venture out into extreme regions of the tonal curve (plus or minus four or five stops), it gave you most of the benefit of RAW or uncompressed DNG for a fraction of the disk space.

mages can now be edited in a preview mode that doesn’t actually require the files to be physically present on the working drive. Any changes made by an editor are automatically backed up to the preview version, and then applied to the original when it’s present, which is great for photographers who store most of their library on external disks.
Adobe Lightroom 5 beta is available as a free public beta for anyone to try, regardless of whether you’ve ever used an Adobe product before, and it will remain free and fully functional until Adobe releases a full retail version of the program later this year. Requires Windows 7 or Windows 8 on PC, or Lion and Mountain Lion on Mac, and supports HiDPI (or Retina display resolution) on both.


Lightroom Overview:
Lightroom software provides a comprehensive set of digital photography tools, from powerfully simple one-click adjustments and features to cutting edge advanced controls. With Lightroom, you can organize, enhance, and showcase your images all from one fast and nimble application that's available on Macintosh and Windows® platforms.
Get the highest possible quality from every pixel in your images using state-of-the-art editing tools.
Easily showcase your work to friends, family, and clients. Craft elegant photo books and share your photographs on social networks or in web galleries, slideshows, prints, and more.
Manage your entire photo collection in a visual library that makes it quick and easy to organize, find, and select your images.