Lightroom 2.1 Release Candidate Installed
Well, I’ve gone ahead and installed the Lightroom 2.1 release candidate that I wrote about yesterday.
I wish that I had more interesting things to report, but honestly, in a “.X” release such as this, uninteresting is usually a good thing! The last thing we want to see are harmful changes.
After installing, startup is seamless (there’s no upgrading of a catalog or anything), and most users won’t notice any changes at all.
On my largest catalogs, I did feel like there was a bit of a performance increase. The area that needs the most help, though, is the localized adjustments. This is still listed in the “pending investigations” area for Adobe’s fixes of Lightroom. From Adobe:
“We are still working on additional methods to improve the performance of the new Localized Correction features.”
Overall, I’m quite pleased and am glad that I updated. I can’t recommend that everyone go out and install this update because it’s not a full release yet, but I think you’d be safe to do so. As with any potentially major system change…backup, backup, backup!!!
If you’d like to go for it, the Lightroom 2.1 release candidate is available here for Mac and PC. Keep in mind that, if you haven’t yet upgraded from 1.4 to 2.0, you’ll need to go here first.
Please feel free to comment with your thoughts.
Filed Under: Reviews
About the Author: Scott Rouse is an Adobe Certified Expert (ACE), photographer, teacher, and graphic- and web-designer in Missoula, MT. His photography focuses on wildlife and adventure sports and can be viewed at 
