Adobe announced the availability of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 5 for Mac OS and Windows today, offering intelligent photo editing features, solutions for remote workflows, and extended sharing and publishing capabilities.  As the digital photography landscape has advanced and evolved, Lightroom has kept pace, offering powerful new features and gaining recognition as the essential photography application for busy professionals and creative amateurs to get the most out of their digital images.

Among the powerful new photo editing tools included in Lightroom 5 are:

• Advanced Healing Brush – helps fix imperfections with the precision and flexibility of a fine brush
• Upright Tool – analyzes and automatically straightens objects such as buildings
• Radial Gradient –  subjects stand out by applying off-center and multiple vignettes in a single image

Smart Previews allow photographers to make edits to their images offline with edits.  Changes made to Smart Previews are automatically applied to the original images when they are reconnected.  Additionally, new video slideshows can combine still images, video clips and music in a creative HD slideshow that can be viewed on almost any device, while updates to the Book module allow users to create, personalize and print beautiful photo books from a variety of tailored and easy-to-use or customer-specific templates.

Lightroom 5 was initially released as a free, public beta in April 2013. Since beta testing, a Behance Publish Service and more than 400 bug fixes have been incorporated into the final release. More detailed information about the updates in Lightroom 5, in addition to pricing and availability, can be found in the full press release here.

Customers can also connect with the Lightroom team directly on Facebook, via Twitter, or on the Adobe Lightroom blog. For Lightroom how-to videos, visit our YouTube channel.

Today we announced the addition of Photoshop Lightroom 4 as part of Adobe Creative Cloud membership, joining other leading tools for digital photography and imaging including Photoshop CS6, Photoshop CS6 Extended and Photoshop Touch.

Lightroom helps photographers quickly import, manage, enhance and showcase images. Our new hub, Creative Cloud provides members with everything needed to create, publish and share work.

We’ll continue to add new products and services, keeping members up to date with our latest advancements – and we’re pleased to deliver on our promise to bring the best in Adobe innovation to Creative Cloud members.

Find out more about this exciting update on our Creative Cloud team blog.

Today Adobe announced the free public beta of Photoshop Lightroom 4, the digital photography workflow solution for both professional and amateur photographers. Available for Windows and Mac as a free download from Adobe Labs, the Lightroom 4 beta previews new workflow efficiencies, and features for image processing and management.

New features in Lightroom 4 beta include:

• Refined technology for shadow and highlight processing
• Native support for videos shot on DSLRs, point-and-shoot cameras and smartphones
• The ability to create beautiful photo books from within Lightroom
• An intuitive Map module with tagging controls for assigning locations
• Soft proofing in the Develop module
• Direct emailing of images from Lightroom

We encourage photographers to try the beta release and share feedback; there are a few avenues to do this:

• Submit comments at the community-powered feedback site: http://feedback.photoshop.com
• Connect with the Lightroom team directly: Facebook (www.facebook.com/lightroom); Twitter (www.twitter.com/lightroom); The Adobe Lightroom blog (http://blogs.adobe.com/lightroomjournal)

We’re really pleased with the new capabilities and expect that you will be, too. We look forward to your thoughts and comments!

Yes, there are certain windows of time in which photographers actually get to step into the shoes of the product development team at Adobe and contribute to a final release. Today, marks the highly anticipated public preview of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 beta for Mac and Windows – a sneak peek of what’s to come. Lightroom has historically been an application formed from the direct feedback of photographers to address specific workflow needs. During the beta period photographers can actually moonlight as product developers, contributing their reactions, requests and responses to what currently exists in the application.

Lightroom is the essential digital photography workflow solution, helping serious amateur and professional photographers quickly import, manage, enhance and showcase all their images from one application. Available as a free download on Adobe Labs, Lightroom 3 beta delivers an early look at new tools that will be in Lightroom 3, including more intuitive importing, unparalleled noise reduction and sharpening tools, enhanced slideshow capabilities and direct publishing to online photo sharing sites like Flickr®. Visit http://labs.adobe.com/downloads to learn more and download the beta. Feedback can be submitted on the Lightroom forums: http://forums.adobe.com/community/lightroom. Users also can connect with Adobe at www.facebook.com/lightroom or www.twitter.com/AdobeLR, and can add the tag #AdobeLR3beta to tweets about the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 beta.

Thousands of Photoshop fans will descend upon Las Vegas this week to attend the world’s largest Photoshop convention – Photoshop World 2009 – hosted by the National Association of Photoshop Professionals (NAPP). Typically, what happens in Vegas, stays there – but the product managers from the Photoshop and Lightroom teams will be exposing it all – sharing their thoughts and observations about the show via Twitter channels – www.twitter.com/adobeps and www.twitter.com/adobelr. Follow the Photoshop and Lightroom teams for a behind the scenes look at the show live from Mandalay Bay convention center and see Johnny L. (senior VP of the Creative Solutions Business) kick it all off at tomorrow morning’s keynote. Are you ready for some football?!!

John Nack from Adobe’s Photoshop team, shares some data on how Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is stacking up with Apple Aperture. Among photo pros using the Mac, Lightroom is now around four times more popular. Remember all those obituaries written for Adobe’s Digital Imaging business when Apple entered the market? Thought not.

Check out his blog post for more details