Photoshop in the beginning
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Written by Robert on February 12, 2008 – 8:47 am
I thought it is best to begin this post on a dignified tone with a short history of where Lightroom came from. Every word of the following epic is the truth – give or take a lie or two. It works best if you imagine it being read by James Earl Jones.
In the beginning, there was Photoshop and it was good. But soon the scribes of photos began to partake of the digital camera and they became restless. Forsaking the fi lm of their fathers, they began creating digital photos as if they were free. Soon digital photos began to multiply throughout the land. Thomas Knoll and Mark Hamburg looked down from Mount Adobe upon the photos wandering about the hard drives and said they need someone to lead them to the Promised Folders lest they be lead astray by a false prophet.
Then a light shone from on high and behold, there was Lightroom. The photo scribes were awed. They beheld its simplicity and beauty and said it was good. Soon all of the photos were rejoicing in their workfl ow and so it came that on the seventh day of the seventh month of the last beta, the entire development team said ‘Behold, our labors are complete and 1.0 has shipped.’ But lo a voice from on high was heard to say ‘Version 1.1’ and the team returned to their labors.
Photoshop Lightroom is a software workflow tool designed by and for photographers. What about Photoshop you might ask? It is instructive to know that when Photoshop was created, digital cameras were nothing more than laboratory toys and scanning photos into digital images was an expensive process. Over the years Adobe has continually improved Photoshop but there is only so much you can change. What was needed was an entirely new application designed from the ground up as a tool for working photographers. This is the driving purpose behind the creation of Lightroom. In a bold stroke, the folks at Adobe shed their traditional cloak of secrecy and allowed the entire world to participate in the creative process by releasing the product as an open beta early in the development cycle. Anyone could download, use, comment, complain, or make suggestions as to how the program should work and comment they did. Each beta release of the software saw it change shape, form, and function. Around November 2006, Adobe ceased posting new versions of Lightroom with the Beta 4 release but continued tweaking and updating the product to a limited number of beta testers. I only mention this because those users who became accustomed to the beta 4 version of Lightroom were a little surprised when they saw the 1.0 version that was released in February 2007. Many testers had a long list of things that they strongly felt were missing in the 1.0 release and so Adobe continued tweaking, renaming, and adding even more features until they finally released the 1.1 version.
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