Lightroom, Nick and I’s development and library management program of choice (yes, despite my cert in Aperture), has now been released to the public as a beta for the new version. While the full version will be as need-to-pay as ever, those of you wanting to try something a bit more flexible, or just plain better laid out than what came with your camera, Picasa, or even Photoshop (whose support for camera raw is astoundingly clunky compared to the svelte elegance of Lightroom), owe it to yourselves to give this a try.

For you vets, apparently Adobe is talking up a much better image processing engine, with better sharpness and noise performance (two of the biggest critiques I’ve seen leveled at LR). It also has better vignetting controls, and introduces a way to add grain to your images, and something about light leaks. I haven’t got to bang around in it yet myself, so I’ll have to try those at home tonight.

Oh, and it’s supposed to just be faster too. Which for those of us with larger libraries will be very well received. I think it’s supposed to demand a pretty boss machine now, though, so check the hardware requirements out.

https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/entitlement/index.cfm?e=labs_lightroom3