I have been using the new Lightroom 1 (not the beta) for a couple of days now.
The first problem I encountered was that Lightroom 1 obviously had huge problems converting the database the beta 4 had created.
After more than 20 hours using up 90 percent of my system resources (I used my notebook for Internet access in the meantime), the blue bar had reached about 2 %...
This was when I gave up on the old database and just imported everything again. After all, I knew some things might not be perfect when installing the beta.
The Interface has somewhat changed. I never quite grasped the difference between "shoots" and folders and the "shoots" are gone for good now.
The import function now works better and has no problem adding default meta data to the files (such as copyright info).
There are some new photo tools in the "develop" section (remove "spots" and red eyes), Filters for marked pictures like in "Raw Shooter", different ways of comparing the "before" and "after" versions of a picture and many new web templates.
Like in Raw Shooter you can now easily copy corrections and apply them to other photographs.
On the whole, the software is now much more user friendly in my opinion. For most raw files I have to deal with, LR alone is able to produce a version I like.
Only where I need to work with layers and such, I need another photo editing software.
The downside is the resource hunger of the application. It easily uses 200-600 MB RAM (Can be much more...) and a lot of CPU time.
I have an Athlon 3500+ with 1 gigabyte of RAM which was perfectly adequate before LR.
Now, when I export a file and it is opened in Paintshop Pro X for further editing, my PC often is not happy.
I guess, you need Vista and several GIGs of RAM to work really fluently with LR and other applications in parallel.
Did anybody else try out the Lightroom final yet?
Laurenz
