As I write, there are no doubt a lot of people getting drunk. It’s Sunday night, and the PMA Australia 2008, held in Brisbane, is finally over. I was only there for two of the four days, and I didn’t even go to a single paid conference event. I was there in a role as a professional photographer come consumer, and as such I was there to suss out future directions, trends, and all the latest gear. It’s a highly personalised experience going to such an event, due to the incredibly diverse nature and levels of professional photography. I hang around the lower levels as it is, but that doesn’t make my perspective any less interesting. Here’s what I thought were some of the interesting bits.. (I’d be here for days to discuss it all)

Adobe – They placed nearly ALL of their focus on Lightroom 2 Beta. Sure, they plugged CS3 and a few other bits and pieces, but they seem obsessed with Lightroom. I am only just today evaluating the product for myself, but to me it sits awkwardly between and on top of other Adobe products. It’s not a full on cataloguing software like iView Media Pro (now Microsoft Expression v2, and more of that later), and neither does it have the browsing power and functionality of Bridge. It handles raw and dng files, and it does some local adjustments and non destructive editing, but in no way does it replace Photoshop. So what does it do? Well, I think the best explanation I got was from well known Photoshop author Mark Galer, who basically said that it was a work flow solution for some photographers, in some situations. To me it feels like it’s aimed at consumers as opposed professionals, but I’m still to really figure out how it works. What I do know however is that my test catalogue of some 3500 images (mostly jpgs and a few hundred raw files thrown in as well) fills up some 3.46GB of space. The images themselves only fill 8.45GB. Admittedly I have 1:1 previews built in to the catalogue, but it’s a whopping catalogue nonetheless. My old iView Media Pro catalogues covering over 10,000 images with full size previews were only 1GB! Go figure… I do like the design of Lightroom however, and I look forward to discovering exactly where it sits amongst the plethora of photographic software now on the market. All I can say however, is that Adobe are going real hard on this one, so I assume they see such a product as filling a very important niche or future direction.

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