Adobe's Lightroom Beta Progress Update

I have not had a ton of pictures to put through Lightroom Beta until my wife's birthday the other day. Here are my thoughts on how it worked for me:

The available equipment is within the guidelines set out by Adobe, however, it is at the very bottom end of things. The application runs okay with 5 megapixel .jpg files, but I shot in RAW for the birthday, and it ran a little slower with the larger file size.

I have only run into one bug so far. Some of the user interface did not collapse (it froze in the outward position) when I changed the available preferences.

Pros:

• The overall workflow seems very well thought out, and makes the development process much easier than any experience I have had in Photoshop.
• I really like the ability to customize the user interface in so many ways.
• The ability to “turn down/off the lights” is really useful as well (this basically puts a black screen around the photo workspace).

Cons:

• The in-built noise reduction does not seem to do much for me, though this could be the result of a mediocre camera sensor (i.e. so much noise in the first place that there is little the application can do).
• Hardware requirements. This probably will not be as big of a deal to most people, but this application takes a lot of system resources. It would be nice if it took less.
• Exporting photos was a bit strange. I did not see a way to batch export, and the export status is not completely obvious to find. (To be fair, though, this is one of the areas they are still working on.)
• Price? I have not seen any kind of price yet, but if you have ever looked into purchasing an Adobe application...

I like using this app. Its fun, well designed, and I don't find myself wondering where to find things. I am curious to see what improvements are made as we go along (and I will keep you updated as I find out more).