My Take on Lightroom 3 Beta

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Adobe has just released Lightroom 3 Beta! Now before you rush out and start downloading I’d like to give you my take on this beta release to help you get off on the right foot.

This is a Beta version, which means it is not the finished product. Beta software is usually stable, but not necessarily bug free. Before you import, please start out by creating a copy of a few folders of photos (already safely backed up) and treat these copies as expendable test files. I don’t expect anything bad to happen to them, but with Beta software there is no reason to take any chances. Think of the Beta release as a way to get a taste for what Adobe has in mind for Lightroom 3, give it a test drive and see what you think. They really want your feedback to incorporate into the final release.

What I’m Most Excited About So Far

Improved rendering. The engineer-elves have added some new magic into LR3 to improve the rendering of our raw photos in regards to noise reduction and capture sharpening. Not finished yet (no Luminance noise reduction right now), but any effort to develop better looking photos gets my vote.
Improved watermarking. OK this may seem like a small thing, but it has been on my list for a very long time. I’m working on a LR3 Beta Watermarking tutorial that should be posted this week. Stay tuned! I’m not quite ready to give up LRMogrify yet though!
Custom Print Packages! Gone will be the days when I have to explain to people why they can’t print 3 different 4×6 photos on an 8.5×11 sheet of paper. Woot!

There is a lot more to love and a lot more to learn! I’ve got several LR3 Beta tutorials in the pipeline so stay tuned, but let me leave you with some valuable resources:

Go to Lightroom Journal and read all about the Lightroom 3 Beta.
Head over to Scott Kelby’s Blog and see what his top 10 list is all about.
Visit the NAPP Lightroom 3 Beta Learning Center to dive into some tutorials.
Check in with Lightroom plugin developer Jeffrey Friedl about using plugins with LR3 Beta.

OK, you are probably really itching to download the Beta … but please please please take a few minutes to read the Release Notes before you do. No, seriously, just give them a go over for known issues. I’m only trying to help!

OK, this Beta is free to everyone for the length of the Beta program so head over to Adobe Labs and take it for a spin. Check back here for more tutorials and resources in the coming days!

New! Updated tutorials for Lightroom 3 Beta:

Posted by Rob Sylvan @ 21 October 2009 15 comments

Tags : Develop , Develop Module , Import , Lightroom , Lightroom 3 Beta , NAPP , Tutorial , Watermark

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15 Comments
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Comments

Oct 22, 2009
12:05 am

#1 Josh :

I can run LR3 without overwriting my LR2 install, right?

Author

Oct 22, 2009
12:12 am

#2 Rob :

Yes you can! The Lightroom 3 Beta will not interfere with LR1 or LR2.

Oct 23, 2009
5:15 pm

#3 Dave :

You have always been able to print multiple images on a single sheet with LR2. It is a bit fiddly and requires some changing of settings within a preset description file but it is possible.

Oct 23, 2009
5:22 pm

#4 Dave :

Can you paint the NR onto parts of the image like other adjustment brushes? Or is it applied to the whole image? As far as I am concerned there is no benefit to improving the NR if you can only apply it to the whole image

Oct 24, 2009
7:39 am

#5 JP :

Yawn. These are X.1 fixes/updates. Nothing here looks truly compelling as an upgrade. Now I LOVE Lightroom 2, but right now I’m not seeing the feature that is going to pry open my wallet.

Author

Oct 24, 2009
8:15 am

#6 Rob :

re #3: Yes, you are correct. Matt did a nice job of highlighting that kludgy-hack back in Feb:

http://www.lightroomkillertips.com/2009/video-multi-photo-picture-packages/

But there is a world of difference between native functionality and kludgy-hacks. The implementation in LR3 Beta is exactly what people have been wanting (without having to dive under the hood).

Author

Oct 24, 2009
8:33 am

#7 Rob :

re #4: Noise reduction is applied to the entire image, just like it is in LR2, but the rendering is greatly improved. Noise reduction control via the Adjustment Brush would indeed be a great feature!

What application do you use that applies noise reduction selectively to only parts of an image?

Would you be supportive of improvements to the noise reduction functionality if it did a better job of protecting the “good” areas while correcting the “bad”?

Author

Oct 24, 2009
8:35 am

#8 Rob :

re #5: What type of new feature/functionality would you consider wallet prying?

Oct 31, 2009
8:56 pm

#9 John Geyer :

I would buy LR3 if had a find similar images so I could weed out dupes. I had this in a Cerious Software program called Thumbs Plus and that was like 7 years ago. It worked great!

Nov 2, 2009
4:46 pm

#10 Dianne :

I see this sentence in the promo “The catalog selection dialog has been expanded and improved” but I can’t seem to find out just what that means. One refinement I’d like to see is the ability to create a new catalog without starting totally from scratch with settings/options/keywords/identity plate. Will we have that flexibility in LR3?

Nov 29, 2009
1:33 pm

#11 Cornelia :

I want to become a new Lightroom customer. So what is better to do: buy LR2.5 now and later upgrade to LR3?
Or better start with LR3-beta and buy LR3 from scratch? In the meantime I would miss luminance-functionality. Any more of core-2.5-functionality that is missing in LR3-beta? Or is just the delta of future LR3 vs. 2.5 not yet available in 3-beta?

Author

Nov 30, 2009
7:32 am

#12 Rob :

I would choose to buy Lightroom 2 now (then free upgrade to 2.5). We don’t know when the full version of Lightroom 3 will be released. Lightroom 3 Beta is not feature complete and while it has some improvements over 2.5 I find 2.5 to be a more reliable tool for the job for now. In the past, the catalog from the current version will be upgradable to the next, so everything you do in Lightroom 2 will transfer to Lightroom 3.

Dec 5, 2009
12:00 am

#13 Robert :

i want tethered shooting

Feb 7, 2010
8:04 pm

#14 MB :

Question: I have LR2. I would prefer not to lod the whole LR3Beta, but rather prefer to wait until the actual version comes out. In the meantime I’m shooting RAW files with my Canon G11 that LR can’t read. Is here a way to take/load a piece of LR3Beta so that LR2 recognizes them? Help! Thanks!

Author

Feb 7, 2010
10:19 pm

#15 Rob :

Actually, all you need is the latest version of Lightroom 2, which is now 2.6:

http://www.adobe.com/downloads/updates/

Lightroom 2.6 supports the G11, but the LR3 Beta does not.