With more than one million downloads of its public beta and heavy anticipation in the air, Adobe announced that its Photoshop Lightroom photography workflow application will ship on February 19th according to an article on Macworld News.

The software, which will sell at a discounted price of US$199 until April 30th and US$299 after April 30th, is currently available for pre-oder through the Adobe store web site.

Adobe Lightroom will be sold individually and not bundled with Adobe's highly-anticipated Creative Studio 3 program. The beta, which proved incredibly popular, has been supplemented with additional features such as a Metadata Browser, which allows the user to search through keywords and tags that most digital cameras embed into images. Quick-fix tools such as Clone and Healing have also been improved upon and allow the user to make changes without making a heavier investment in a full version of Adobe Photoshop.

Adobe Lightroom will also support more than 150 native RAW file formats as well as stand as an in-between program - more powerful than Adobe's entry-level Photoshop Elements yet less costly than the pro-grade Adpbe Photoshop. Adobe Lightroom will allow users to step up their Photoshop Elements files through an import that brings their Photoshop Elements library directly into Lightroom.

The current Adobe Lightroom beta, which expires on February 28th, requires a Macintosh running Mac OS X 10.4.3 with a 1 GHz or faster G4, G5 or Intel processor. The program will run at native speeds on both PowerPC and Intel-based Macintosh hardware due to its being a universal binary.