I can't believe it's already been almost a couple months since I last posted. yikes. I was in southeast asia for about half the time and since then i've just been busy with work and trying to process the 2500 photos that I took, so I haven't taken any new shots this month :/

Anyways, I've been working on my photo processing pretty much every day since I got back and thus I've been spending a lot of time with the Lightroom beta. After last weeks announcement about the Lightroom 1.0 release I have to admit that I am drooling with anticipation. I've been reading through a more thorough review of the 1.0 release and I have to say that the improvements sound amazing.

The new folder based image management that will replace shoots sounds cool, even though I didn't mind the way the shoots worked. One of coolest looking new additions is the new flags and color labels rating tools. As I've been working through the 2500 photos from my asia trip I have been constantly sorting and organizing the photos into various batches and states, which has been a bit cumbersome. The additional rating tools sound like exactly what I need.

The develop module also appears to be getting some nice boosts and the new spot cloning and healing tools are going to be wonderful because I have some images from my trip with spots on them and I am not looking forward to having to switch to CS2 in order to deal with them :/ I am also pretty jazzed to try out that new TAT for the tone adjustments, I never would have conceived of such a thing but it sounds nifto.

Now I just wish the damn thing was available now, when I really need it. I want to be done processing my photos before Feb 19th :(