Adobe Lightroom 3 Review

Develop Mode

The develop mode is perhaps the most important section of lightroom. In this mode, you can touch up and adjust a photo as many ways as you can think of. It contains simple adjustments such as the white balance to more advanced features such as color correction for cameras.

As expected, you can adjust basic parameters such as exposure, brightness and contrast. Along with these features this mode includes the tools to crop, straighten, remove red eye, and also to retouch the image. Below are some of the more advanced and useful features that Lightroom contains out of the box.

Adjustments and Settings

Basic

Here you can adjust things such as white balance, etc:

• Exposure
• Recovery
• Fill Light
• Blacks
• Brightness
• Contrast
• Clarity
• Vibrance
• Saturation

Tone Curve

In this menu you can adjust how light the tones are:

• Highlights
• Lights
• Darks
• Shadows
• Point curve (Adjustment for the graph)

HSL / Color / B&W

Here you can adjust hue, saturation, and lumance of specific colors:

• Red
• Orange
• Yellow
• Green
• Aqua
• Blue
• Purple
• Magenta

Split Toning

This menu allows you to change the highlights one color and shadows a different color.

• Hue
• Saturation

Detail

This menu is used for sharpening, and noise reduction of photos.

• Sharpening
  • Amount
  • Radius
  • Detail
  • Masking
• Noise Reduction
  • Luminance
  • Detail
  • Contrast
• Color
• Detail

Lens Corrections

This section has lens profiles to correct for lens distortions, etc.

• Distortion
• C. Aberrations
• Vignetting

Effects

In this menu there are settings for vignetting and grain effects.

• Vignetting
  • Style
  • Amount
  • Midpoint
  • Roundness
  • Feather
  • Highlights
• Grain
  • Amount
  • Size
  • Roughness

Camera Calibration

This setting adjust the colors of the photo. should be used to correct camera differences

• Shadows
• Hue(for RGB)
• Tint(for RGB)

RAW Support

Lightroom supports over 290 RAW formats, and they are constantly being updated. RAW images are treated the same way as JPG's, but they allow for added flexibility with many of Lightroom's adjustment tools. For example the exposure adjustments are the same in both types but stronger adjustments can be made on the RAW file. Because it eliminates the overhead that "developing" RAW files usually introduces, Lightroom is an excellent solution for photographers who shoot RAW.

The latest version of lightroom is also bundled with the same RAW processing and lens correction engine as Photoshop CS5, bringing improved results from RAW files over the previous two versions of Lightroom.

Noise Reduction

One really useful feature of lightroom is its built in noise reduction capability. This feature is found in the develop mode, under detail. 

The built in noise reduction works exceptionally well, below is an example of it in action:

Also take note that this photo was taken directly from Lightroom. Lightroom has a viewing mode where you can compare the original photo to the edited photo. 

Snapshots

Another useful feature of Lightroom is its "snapshots" feature. With this feature, you can save the state of a photo and you can recall it back at a later time. An example of when this comes in useful is when you're happy with the photo, you can save the snapshot so you can still experiment with it. If you don't like the results from experimenting you can revert to the saved snapshot.  This is analogous to the snapshot feature in Photoshop.

Lens Correction

In this mode lightroom can identify the lens that the photo was taken with, and also adjust for distortion, chromatic aberration, and vignetting.  Lightroom includes many lens profiles so that you can just choose what lens you took the picture with and it will adjust the settings appropriately.  As with RAW support, new lens profiles are frequently released.  You can also create your own lens profiles.  Visit our forum for an archive of user-created Pentax lens profiles.

Gradients and Masking

Another handy Lighroom feature is the ability to adjust specific sections of the photo. The Gradient tool adjusts a section of the image, this is mainly used for editing the sky to either make it darker or lighter. The Masking tool is to adjust settings in a very specific section. Below is an example of darkening the sky with just the gradient tool and lowering the exposure:

Notice that the sky is slightly darker and perfectly fades in with the rest of the image to make a seemless adjustment!

Batch Editing (Syncing)

Lightroom's batch editing ability makes it extremely easy to have your changes to a single photo propragate through however many photos you select. This feature is called "Sync" in the develop panel. To do this select all the photos you want synced on the bottom panel where it shows the pictures, and press sync. Once you press Sync, a menu pops up and asks you what settings you want to apply to other photos. You can select specific ones or simply sync all of them.