If you do much photography at all, you probably have come across and enjoyed Adobe Lightroom, the digital darkroom suite that makes photo editing a snap, especially for RAW files, which preserves a wide variety of information for better results when tweaking things like exposure, sharpness and color balance. Now, Adobe’s Lightroom lead Tom Hogarty has demoed an upcoming version of the software for iOS (via Engadget), and it looks good.
The Lightroom demo appeared in an episode of The Grid, and showed an early beta version of Lightroom running on an iPad 2. The mobile version uses Smart Previews, a feature recently introduced in the Lightroom 5 beta Adobe introduced in April. That allows you to make edits to a photo’s preview even when it isn’t connected to the source file, and then have those updates applied to the original RAW once it’s reconnected. That means that you won’t have to carry around huge files on your iOS device, and can still do a lot of the things you can do with Lightroom for desktop on your mobile device.
The fact that Lightroom syncs and transfers edits back and forth from the mobile and desktop versions is probably the most impressive part of the whole thing. RAW editors exist for iOS already, but the industry standard from Adobe coming to Apple’s mobile devices is a huge development that will really add to the photographers toolkit. Hogarty wouldn’t say exactly when Lightroom is coming, but it’s nice to see that it’s in development and apparently quite far along.
