As many photographers are aware, Adobe has responded to Apple’s Aperture program with their own application, dubbed Lightroom, which, according to this article in Macworld, is to be released in beta form this Monday at the Macworld Expo.

While Aperture has won many over with its sexy styling and intuitive controls, many photojournalists, especially students, do not have a machine powerful enough to handle Aperture’s system requirements nor the money to upgrade. As AppleInsider points out,

Aperture was designed to run on computers such as the 1.25GHz 15- or 17-inch PowerBook G4, Apple on its Web site recommends that software be used on a computer with at least two (dual) 2GHz PowerPC G5 processors and 2GB of RAM for optimal performance.

According to sources, Adobe developed Lightroom to run on a slew of Macs not supported by Aperture. The company hopes that Lightroom’s more lenient set of system requirements will be one its greatest benefits and selling points.

You can read Macworld’s first look at Adobe Lightroom here or download the Lightroom beta from Adobe and start experimenting with it yourself (note: reqs OS X 10.4.3 or greater, Windows version currently not available).