Lightroom for iPad on the way, as Adobe demos prototype version

CNET reports Adobe demonstrating an early prototype of a version of Lightroom for tablets, designed primarily to act as a companion app to the full version …

Tom Hogarty, Adobe’s group product manager for Lightroom, wouldn’t promise when the app would ship or what exactly it would do, but he did demonstrate some features of the prototype software running on an iPad 2. He also offered several details about its features:

• The ability to edit photos taken in raw photo formats, including Lightroom develop-module parameters like exposure, clarity, shadows, highlights, and white balance.

• Cloud-synchronized editing so that changes made on a tablet arrive on the same photo on the PC.

• The ability to zoom all the way to 100 percent for checking photo focus and details.

And without promising anything, he said he’d like to see some of Lightroom’s library-module features, like sorting photos into categories or flagging picks and rejects, in the app.

While it’s unlikely that professionals and serious amateurs would use an iPad as their primary editing platform, there’s definite benefit in the ability to do sorting and basic edits at a shoot, or on the way back, and to have those edits sync with the photo when imported into the full version of Lightroom on a Mac.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=LVzcicQi00w