A few months ago, I wrote about an announcment of a new application called Lightroom, from Adobe Labs. It’s in Beta 3 and has a few charming quirks in place. But at the time of my post, I was not really willing to adopt a change to my familar of workflow using Adobe Photoshop CS1.

But after my recent short trip to Cuba, I’ve finally taken the plunge into Lightroom and I think I’ve fallen in love. It is the most intuitive tool for managing the 1500+ shots I took during my five days.

Now that I’m getting to grips with Lightroom, I can’t help but feel that Photoshop is about 10x more program than I actually need for this type of work, namely selecting, managing, comparing, ranking, developing and printing my photos. All the intracacies and and minutia of Photoshop’s one million tools have been very purposefully stripped away to leave a lean, intuitive, modern and flexible piece of software.

The beta is still free and available for windows and mac platforms. Get it here. There’s also a very nice set of screencasts as tutorials here.

My photos from Cuba, post Lightroom workflow, are coming shortly.