{"id":3365,"date":"2016-01-09T13:31:47","date_gmt":"2016-01-09T21:31:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/?p=3365"},"modified":"2016-01-09T13:35:08","modified_gmt":"2016-01-09T21:35:08","slug":"happy-10th-birthday-lightroom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/2016\/01\/09\/happy-10th-birthday-lightroom\/","title":{"rendered":"Happy 10th birthday, Lightroom!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Ten years ago today, Adobe released the first public preview of \u201cProject Lightroom.\u201d It was Mac-only, ultra lightweight, wildly incomplete, and very promising. Dizzy after blazing all over Europe previewing the app to journalists,\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.adobe.com\/jnack\/2006\/01\/introducing_project_lightroom.html\">here\u2019s how I blogged it<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>First, the product isn\u2019t finished, <em>and that\u2019s a good thing<\/em>. Letting a preview version into the wild now lets us engage the broad photography community in a new way. It\u2019s the nature of the beast that just about any 1.0 product will have some shortcomings and rough edges. The thing is, we\u2019re not going to start charging for ours until you\u2019ve had plenty of time to kick the tires &amp; help shape the feature set.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Amazingly, the demo video from that first post is still available, so I&#8217;ve stuck it onto YouTube for the occasion:<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"604\" height=\"453\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/PXjdRppbzaM?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"autoplay; encrypted-media\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Looking back, my antipathy towards Apple (which had just released Aperture for $499 (!) at PhotoPlus in late October) was so clear. <em>Your 1.0 is incomplete, too<\/em>, I was saying, <em>and we\u2019re going to contrast your chutzpah with our humility<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Yet <strong>the best thing ever to happen to Lightroom was Aperture<\/strong>. It got us out of our heads &amp; got the app into users\u2019 hands. Before Aperture shipped, Adobe had spent three+ years running in circles on a great idea, not sure how to explain it to users, establish its value, and still protect Photoshop. Then Apple wrapped the Javitz Center in a 40-foot-high banner that said, \u201cEverything you need after the shoot.\u201d Bang, it was game on: a matter of weeks later, Lightroom had transformed from a pile of greasy parts on the garage floor to a useful, impressive beta. We never looked back, and over the following years, I loved writing about <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.adobe.com\/jnack\/2009\/09\/lightroom_vs_aperture_09.html\">LR kicking Aperture\u2019s ass<\/a>\u00a0among pros.<\/p>\n<p>Now, let\u2019s see what the next decade brings. \ud83d\ude42 [<a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/PXjdRppbzaM\">YouTube<\/a>]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ten years ago today, Adobe released the first public preview of \u201cProject Lightroom.\u201d It was Mac-only, ultra lightweight, wildly incomplete, and very promising. Dizzy after blazing all over Europe previewing the app to journalists,\u00a0here\u2019s how I blogged it: First, the product isn\u2019t finished, and that\u2019s a good thing. Letting a preview version into the wild [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3365"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3365"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3365\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3367,"href":"http:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3365\/revisions\/3367"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3365"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3365"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3365"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}