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Adobe unveils Carousel, the Lightroom for iPad you’ve been clamoring for

Adobe is definitely on a roll these days. Just in the past thirty days the company unveiled an iWeb-like tool for building web sites and a PDF-creation app for iPhone and iPad. Earlier today, Adobe announced its Digital Publishing Suite will get the much-needed iOS 5 Newsstand support and now we learn about Adobe Carousel, a missing link aimed at fans of the company’s integrated photography solutions. The program lets you access your entire photo library on your computer from any iOS device and vice versa. It all happens wirelessly and automatically, without you having to sync or transfer photos manually. From Adobe:

Adobe Carousel gives you a new way to enjoy your photos, making all of them available across your Mac and iOS devices, so you can browse, enhance, and share them easily. No manual syncing, no storage limits, no differences in what photos are available to you. Your photography is everywhere you are.

It’s built on the Photoshop Lightroom technology so you’ll get “consistent, high-quality results across devices”, the blurb has it. You can fix exposure, white balance and saturation, adjust contrast, brightness and vibrance, among other features. Similar to the famous Camera+ app, editing in Adobe Carousel is non-destructive, always preserving your original photo. You can also assign other people privileges to browse your library, favorite photos and more.

The app will be released on both the App Store and Mac App Store soon as a free download. You should know that a paid cloud account will be required, starting at six bucks a month until January 31, 2012 (twice as much after that). Versions for Windows and Android are in the works so you’ll eventually be able to manage photos across all major platforms. Funny thing, remember when Steve Jobs had to beg Adobe to build Mac versions? It’s also nice how Adobe’s John Nack described Carousel using Apple-like words in a post on the official Adobe blog, quoted below the fold…

[youtube=ww.youtube.com/watch?v=fhgUQ6L3Hiw]

“Lightroom for iPad” has been the clearest customer mandate I’ve heard in 10+ years at Adobe. Photographers are clamoring to transfer photos wirelessly to their tablets, review & tweak them there, and then sync the results with their desktops.

Adobe Carousel embraces that vision–and takes it further. This new app–announced today for iOS and Mac OS X (with Android & Windows versions in development)–brings a highly tuned version of the Lightroom/Camera Raw engine to mobile devices, combining it with excellent multi-device syncing.

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