Adobe released a new public beta version of its Lightroom photo editing and workflow management software on Wednesday.

Lightroom 2.0 adds support for 64-bit environments on both Mac OS X and Windows Vista. It also adds non-destructive editing of localized areas within images, so you can adjust the exposure of the background of a photograph, for example, without altering the foreground.

There are other, smaller enhancements. The new Smart Collections feature helps you organize your photo library by automatically sorting images based on ratings, keywords or date — just like Smart Playlists in iTunes. Lightroom 2.0 also adds support for multiple monitors, a must for a serious digital darkroom. Photoshop guru John Nack has the details on his blog at Adobe.com.

While Adobe Photoshop has long been the killer app in the professional photog’s toolkit, the growing culture of photo sharing on the web plus dropping prices on high-end digital gear has led to the emergence of a new breed of hybrid software applications which act more as workflow managers.

Lightroom, along with Aperture, Apple’s competing "digital darkroom" application, have gained momentum with the prosumers who gather at websites like Zooomr and Flickr. These apps are stripped-down versions of their heavyweight big brothers, made more for organizing, editing and processing dozens of photos on the fly than fine-tuning all the details of the images.

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Adobe recently launched Photoshop Express, the company’s new online photo editing and sharing service, but as savvy readers have pointed out, to use Express you need to agree to terms of service that appear to grant Adobe the “worldwide, royalty-free, nonexclusive, perpetual, irrevocable” right to do basically whatever it wants with your images.

Obviously those are unacceptable terms for most people, especially given that there are plenty of other free online image editors that don’t involve giving any rights to your photos.

While the Photoshop Express TOS is probably the result of a disconnect between Adobe’s lawyers and, well, the real world; until the TOS are changed you might want hold off on uploading any images to Photoshop Express.

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Photoshop Express, the long-awaited free online image editor from Photoshop maker Adobe, will be released as a public beta on Thursday. Unlike Adobe’s more powerful image editing tools for the desktop, Photoshop Express is aimed not at the professional photographer, but at the casual snapshot fan looking to polish up images before sharing them online at sites like Photobucket, Facebook and Flickr.

Photoshop Express, which will compete with other free image editors like Picnik and FotoFlexer, is tailored toward the casual user with easy-to-use, one-click editing tools. And while it’s new creation has a few disadvantages when compared to other online tools, Adobe’s name recognition and status as a long-time leader in pro photography technology should be enough to attract the crowds.

The service also integrates with a number of photo-sharing websites, enabling you to push and pull photos from Facebook, Photobucket and Picasa, though not, at least for now, Flickr. Adobe tells Wired.com that support for Flickr in the works, but won’t be available during the initial beta testing phase.

Photoshop Express offers two gigabytes of online storage space and requires Flash Player 9. The interface should be familiar to anyone who’s used Photoshop or Photoshop Elements and offers tools like cropping, red eye correction, sharpening, touchup and more, including a set of advanced effects for changing colors, distorting images and converting photos to black and white.

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Adobe has released an upgrade for Photoshop Lightroom, the company’s camera RAW workflow application. The Lightroom upgrade coincides with an update to the Photoshop Camera Raw plug-in.

Buth updates add some more new camera files formats — including the Pentax K-20 — bringing the total number of supported cameras to over 200 models. There are also some bug fixes in both apps, including one that turned off the color noise reduction option when converting an image to grayscale mode.

Also of interest to Mac users, Lightroom 1.4 has some updated printer drivers which the company claims offer better compatibility with Leopard, Mac OS X 10.5. Lightroom has had some trouble in Leopard, mainly with the Print Module, so hopefully this update will solve those issues.

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