Adobe has, just one minute ago, announced the February release of Lightroom version 1.0, its digital photo workflow application. (The official name is “Adobe® Photoshop® Lightroom™” but everyone but Adobe will call it simply “Adobe Lightroom,” including me.)

Update: see my What's New in Lightroom 1.1 post.

Lightroom allows one to quickly and effectively process large numbers of digital images. I often take 500+ pictures at a single event, and Lightroom lets me quickly go through them, sorting them, hiding/deleting the bad, make small adjustments (or large adjustments — I'm still not a good photographer) in exposure, white balance, rotation, color, de-spotting, etc.

It has modules for dealing with photos as a library (sorting, editing metadata, etc.), “developing” the image (making the aforementioned adjustments), producing slideshows, web pages, and for printing. For the most part, I use only the first two.

I've mentioned Adobe's Lightroom software a number of times in the past — it's been in public beta for a year, and I've been using it since “beta 2” in the summer. The most recent public beta is “beta 4.1”, released in October, but for the last month or so, I've been privileged to be part of a small, private “beta 5” / “Release Candidate” test group, where we put Lightroom through its paces, report bugs and make product suggestions, testing and retesting with each build they release to us.

I use some of the new features in 1.0 to automate each morning's update of my bento page.

There's so much to write about Lightroom that I could write a book about it... but I won't (although many are).

In this post, I'll just offer a few views of the two modules that I use the most — Library and Develop — to whet your appetite.

Note that all the panes around the sides/top/bottom can be hidden or shown independently.

Loupe View is part of the Library Module, along with the Grid View (first pic above) and Survey View (pic below). In this screencapture, the flimstrip at the bottom is showing, as is the metadata pane at right, but the organizational pane (normally at left) is hidden, as is the module navigation pane across the top. (Both are shown in the first picture above.)

In this screenshot, all the optional panes but the filmstrip are hidden.

The Develop module allows you to adjust a bunch of things, including white balance/tint, many exposure settings (color intensity, brightness, contrast, etc.), enter grayscale mode, apply sharpening, apply noise reduction (separate adjustments for color vs. luminance), correct chromatic aberration, correct for lens vignetting, use a Photoshop-esque clone tool and healing tool, fix red-eye, and rotate and crop the image.

What's really cool is that all the controls are the same whether the input is a raw file, a JPG, a TIFF, or a Photoshop PSD file.

There are so many things new from the previous public beta, I don't know where to start. Just the main ones from the Library and Develop module that I can think of off the top of my head:

• Clone/Healing/Red-eye tools
• Virtual copies (allows multiple adjustments/crops/etc for the same image)
• Image stacks
• Two new ways to rate photos besides the current 0-5 star system: flags (“picked”, “rejected”, “no flag”) and colors (an image can have one of five color tags associated with it).
• Lots of keyword-related tools, including a keyword stamper and keyword browser
• Intuitive folder-oriented layout replaces the “shoots” layout.
• Export presets (yeah!)
• Many editable presets (for filenames, metadata, export settings...)
• Can import/export Photoshop PSD files
• A “watched folder” — images showing up in the folder are automatically imported.

There are a bajillion more, but I've forgotten much of what Beta 4 was like, and I wanted to get this post out now that Lightroom has been officially announced and I'm no longer bound by the NDA in discussing its features. I was out this morning and didn't see the heads-up about today's announcement until just an hour ago, so this was the best I could put together in that time.

I'm very excited.... Lightroom is really great news for all digital photographers.

I have a page of Lightroom 1.x Resources for links to tidbits and detailed information.