Photoshop Lightroom 1.0 now has keyword features to make image searches easier.

Adobe announced today that Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 1.0 is ready for commercial release. Priced at $299, Photoshop Lightroom 1.0 will be available on February 19 for both Macintosh and Windows. Adobe has a price special of $199 to buyers who order Photoshop Lightroom before April 30.

Photoshop Lightroom is a software post-production tool for professional photographers. It features organizational tools for large photo collections, non-destructive photo editing tools, and slideshow, print, and Web presentation tools.

Version 1.0 will have new features not seen in any Photoshop Lightroom beta, including:

• Keyword tools;

• The ability to label images with color tags;

• A pick/reject classification tool;

• Hue, Saturation, and Luminance tools;

• Clone and Healing tools;

• Support for 150 raw file formats.

The current beta 4.1 is set to expire on February 28. Tom Hogarty, Product Manager for Photoshop Lightroom said that Adobe is exploring the possibility of releasing public betas of major upgrades to Photoshop Lightroom after version 1.0 is released. A free trial is available from Adobe.com.

Hogarty also stressed that Photoshop Lightroom’s development timeline is independent of Adobe Creative Suite, which is approaching its third iteration (betas of Photoshop CS3 and Bridge CS3 have been released). "It lets the application be more flexible in terms of release schedule, " said Hogarty. Hogarty also explained that Photoshop Lightroom is a tool for the photographer’s workflow, while the CS3 suite is for print and Web professionals. For CS3 users, Adobe Bridge, with its workgroup management tools and PDF and InDesign preview support, is the appropriate organizational tool.

Last year, Adobe released Photoshop Lightroom as a public beta available for download from the Adobe Labs. Since the beta’s release, over one million copies have been downloaded by over 500,000 unique users, according to Hogarty.

Photoshop Lightroom 1.0 is a Universal application that requires a G4 Mac or later or an Intel Core Duo-based Mac, Mac OS 10.4 or later, 768MB of RAM (1GB recommended), at least 1GB of hard disk space, a display that support 1,024 by 768 resolution, and a CD-ROM drive.