It was Photoshop developer Mark Hamburg who started Lightroom, with a project code-named “Shadowland†in 2002.
He enlisted Phil Clevenger to design the new look for the application. One interesting note about Lightroom is that 40 percent of its implementation was written in Lua (Portuguese moon), a dynamically typed language intended for use as an extension or scripting language.
Engineering talent for Lightroom was provided by a Minnesota-based team who had created Adobe’s ImageReady application.
On January 9, 2006 Lightroom was released to the public as a Mac-only beta. Windows support was added in Beta 3 which was released on July 18, 2006.
Adobe Systems officially announced on January 29, 2007 that Lightroom would ship starting February 19 at a price of $299 ($199 introductory price up to April 30).
The rest, as they say, is history.
[Via: GoLightroom.com]