Adobe Lightroom 3 Beta 1

*Gus* · 10-22-2009, 04:40 AM

It's out:
Adobe Labs - Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3

New features listed on the page:
* Brand new performance architecture, building for the future of growing image libraries
* State-of-the-art noise reduction to help you perfect your high ISO shots
* Watermarking tool that helps you customize and protect your images with ease
* Portable sharable slideshows with audio—designed to give you more flexibility and impact on how you choose to share your images, you can now save and export your slideshows as videos and include audio
* Flexible customizable print package creation so your print package layouts are all your own
* Film grain simulation tool for enhancing your images to look as gritty as you want
* New import handling designed to make importing streamlined and easy
* More flexible online publishing options so you can post your images online to certain online photo sharing sites directly from inside Lightroom 3 beta (may require third-party plug-ins)*

Basically, nothing from my wishlist, unless I'm missing something or there's more that's not listed. Oh well...

PolishMike · 10-22-2009, 05:44 AM

Really not much of an upgrade - I'll beleive the claimed engine improvements when I see them. It seems like they pushed this one out for the sake of maintaining an even product cycle.
No advanced selection tools, no perspective/distortion correction, no panorama stitching or HDR options...

Direct upload to Flickr should be quite nice though.

*séamuis* · 10-22-2009, 05:55 AM

ill give it a whirl.

Alfisti · 10-22-2009, 06:32 AM

Can we just get a cloning tool that doesn't confuse the crap outta me and more exporting options already (namely sharpening, i cannot beleive we settled fro "SOFT, MEDIUM, HARD" for exporting .... for the love of god.

legacyb4 · 10-22-2009, 07:28 AM

Hasn't that been the case since the days following Photoshop 7 or so?

Originally Posted by PolishMike

It seems like they pushed this one out for the sake of maintaining an even product cycle.

Pentax_XTC · 10-22-2009, 07:28 AM

Lightroom is a RAW Developer masked as an actual program. I use Lightroom for what it is and use Photoshop for everything else. They don't want to give you certain things because they would be competing with their own software.

That being said, any 'Digital Darkroom' software should have basic lens distortion correction built in. Otherwise I have to convert the RAW to a pixel based image to correct it. There goes my non-distructive workflow for eveything I did before.

I hope that the advanced noise reduction is licenced from someone like Nik Software. Otherwise it will be the same 'improvement' that has been offered before... Which means you'll have to buy third party software for noise reduction.

Sorry for the rant but I've been in Lightroom 2.4 all week working on stuff and I'm irritated.

Alfisti · 10-22-2009, 07:53 AM

Unless you're seriously into selections you can do 90% of your processing in LR. It's mor epowerful than it looks but agreed, distorition correction is sorely needed.

BTW just export to PS as a tiff ..... you lose SFA.

PolishMike · 10-22-2009, 09:17 AM

Originally Posted by legacyb4

Hasn't that been the case since the days following Photoshop 7 or so?

Well, yes, but Lightroom is one piece Adobe software in like 8 years to actually be a fresh and well though-out concept, and it's a shame to see it stop innovating and just go the way of all the "CS" bloatware.

Originally Posted by Alfisti

Unless you're seriously into selections you can do 90% of your processing in LR. It's mor epowerful than it looks but agreed, distorition correction is sorely needed.

Well, I indeed do 90% of my processing in Lightroom. If it had more competent selection tools, I would do about 95% of processing there. Lightroom's selective filters would be ridiculously powerful if only they added a colour range selection, magic wand, lasso tool and add/subtract/intersect/invert mask tools.

I hate it when companies cripple their products just to differentiate between them - if Lightroom was not made by the same company as Photoshop, I'm sure we would already have all the features on my wish list.

Eruditass · 10-22-2009, 09:32 AM

Some good additions (film grain, finally I can get rid of Photoshop!), hopefully in the final version it will have lens correction and softproofing.

*Gus* · 10-22-2009, 11:23 AM

For architectural photography it is unusable on its own as the majority of shots would require perspective correction (unless you're using a PC lens). Granted external editing solves the problem, but it's a pain to use, slow, you end up with TIFFs six times the size of RAW files and you lose all the history. Not much left in there in favor of Lightroom.

Read somewhere on Adobe forums that the developers don't actually have it in the pipeline because of some technical issue. And the someone else mentions how Adobe is modifying the DNG specs to include auto distortion control for the Lumix LX3?!

The beta seems slow on my machine, but it's still beta so possibly all the enabled debug code.

Eruditass · 10-22-2009, 11:25 AM

You can always perspective correct before any editing or at the end of any editing.

But I do hope they implement it. A lot of people are complaining about it.

*dugrant153* · 10-22-2009, 12:46 PM

strangely enough, I think this works out well for me.

My demo version of Adobe Lightroom 2 just expired!

*Gus* · 10-22-2009, 04:26 PM

Someone on the Adobe forums wrote that LR3 is still not feature complete and that new features may find their way into new release(s) of this major version.

Glen · 10-22-2009, 05:17 PM

Originally Posted by Alfisti

Can we just get a cloning tool that doesn't confuse the crap outta me and more exporting options already (namely sharpening, i cannot beleive we settled fro "SOFT, MEDIUM, HARD" for exporting .... for the love of god.

And I thought it was just me. I still haven't figured that tool out except for when I do the simplest of corrections (one spot).

I was hoping for a built in e-mail program selection tool. Most programs let you select what program you use for e-mailing so that it will bring up a message with the selected photo's. With Lightroom, I had to download a special preset to do that.

I still love the program but Adobe must use Microsoft as their mentor.

krypticide · 10-23-2009, 12:50 AM

I'm pretty sure they will add new features for the final build. I remember for Lightroom 2 some pretty big features did not show up in the beta, but were there at launch.