November 9, 2007
Naked light public beta due out later today
Later today, Friday 9th November, you will be able to download a public beta of Naked light, a new program that looks rather interesting in that it appears it will offer quite a few of the non-destructive features that people have been asking for in Lightroom. There is no information on the site to say who is behind the program’s development, however we do know that it will only run on Apple’s Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. But not only are the requirements Apple only, the site’s graphics, the interface design, the tightly controlled pre-release marketing, even the countdown time clock. Everything here does look very ‘Apple’…
From the Naked light website:
Public beta arriving Friday, November 9th, 2007.
The emperor has new clothes. Introducing Naked light. Non-destructive image editing. Node-based compositing. Live filters. High-end tools. And infinite resolution. It’s image editing, re-invented. Take the tour.
Node-based compositing. Naked light features nodes—simple building blocks in a composition like a images, filters, and sets of brush strokes. Nodes can be arranged in novel ways that layers cannot. Learn more.
Infinite resolution. Layout images and define tools and filters in real-life units like inches, millimeters, and picas. Mix and match images with different resolutions, color spaces, and pixel aspect ratios in the same composition. Learn more.
Pro tools. Use precise tools with photographer-friendly units, like stops. Access tools quickly with the Tool and Filter Dock. And try out new tools like the Noise Brush and Gradient Selections. Learn more.
Live filters. Filters can be edited and re-edited, forever. Work multiple filters holistically to achieve the perfect effect, rather than one-at-a-time. Never get caught up in dialogue boxes—Naked light lets you quickly edit all filters directly in your canvas and inspector. Learn more.
Non-destructive editing. In Naked light, it’s impossible to ruin an image. All your original images and negatives are stored safely in your Library, so you’ll never have to worry about writing over a file or over tweaking a layer. Learn more.
This is not a “public beta”! It’s a “public alpha”! Even the author says so. While it looks promising, the tremendously undeveloped state makes me concerned that the author is biting off more than he can chew. Right now, it’s no better or worse than a movie trailer. The author says it should not/cannot be used for production. My recommendation is not to bother with it until it’s more developed.
clewis303, most of what you say has been expressed by others who’ve downloaded it. I think what you say makes a lot of sense (such that I haven’t attempted to download it and will not until it’s ready for prime time).
There’s been such an interest in this product that the author’s bandwidth was exceeded and he’s pulled it off the Web according to his RSS feed while looking for a new place to host it. For those, like me, who are extremely interested in Brandon’s product, here’s the link for his RSS feed:
http://www.naked.la/emperor/feed.rss
Given the amount of interest and flak Brandon’s gotten, I think that the next release will be worth examining.
Well, it’s a bottle you can see as either half empty (the ‘trailer’ doesn’t seem to be very operative?) or half full (it’s great to have people working on this subject!).