I finally got around to playing with the Lightroom beta over the last couple of days and I have to say: it's fantastic. I'm running it on the latest version of the 15" PowerBook G4, with a hi-res screen, 1.67 GHz G4 and 1.5 GB RAM, and it runs quick. App startup time is virtually nil, and the whole thing just feels zippy. It offers a great array of features centered around this image comparison/organization paradigm, and some of them are the type of tools where, upon using them, I never even realized I was missing. Some of the toolsets are simply a sort of remixing of the tools and palettes found in Photoshop, offering a very different and handy UI for accomplishing the same kinds of editing, touching up, print preparation and comparison tasks. If you haven't checked out a demo yet, I highly recommend you do (as long as you're on OS X; a Windows demo is still pending).

The differences and similarities of Lightroom to Bridge are very interesting, as I mentioned John Nack covers in one of his posts. First and foremost, I think, is Lightroom's use of an all-encompassing Library (in ~/Pictures/Lightroom) for organization, with not much in the way of a system file browser to be seen. Upon importing images to work with, you have the choice of leaving them in whatever folder structure they are stored, or you can copy/move them into Lightroom's library. This stands quite in contrast to Bridge's more "file browsing and organizing" approach, allowing you to browse the file system and add individual folders to a "favorites" list for easy retrieval. I'm not saying either system is bad or good; I just wanted to point it out for those who might have an organizational preference for one paradigm or the other.

But of course, Lightroom isn't really meant to be a pro version of Bridge - it's an image comparison and touch-up/editing tool, and at those tasks it excels. I think the new and remixed UI of editing tools is a dream to use. I honestly don't want to be gleaming with Lightroom appreciation here, but I haven't really run into any complaints yet. Of course, I'm not a six-figure photographer with gobs and gobs of images from photoshoots to crunch through, so I'm anxious to see more serious run-throughs from those more pro than I.