Lightroom 3.0 Beta Now Available!

[rosemanbridge]

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/lightroom3/

[Josh-H]

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/lightroom3/

Some of the new features included for you to play with in the Lightroom 3 beta are:

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)*

Some nice new features in there - I particularly like the export of slideshows with audio and improved Noise Reduction

But NO MENTION OF SOFT PROOFING!!!!

CMON GUYS!

[DarkPenguin]

# 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)

The first two items look interesting.  The others not so much.

[DarkPenguin]

The videos (here -> http://tv.adobe.com/show/what-s-new-in-lightroom-3-beta/ ) are worth watching.

[Tklimek]

Whoa...please someone say it ain't true!  It has to be there....must be there......?  Maybe not in the public beta?  I would be pretty shocked if it wasn't available in the final release.

Todd in Chicago

Some of the new features included for you to play with in the Lightroom 3 beta are:

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)*

Some nice new features in there - I particularly like the export of slideshows with audio and improved Noise Reduction

But NO MENTION OF SOFT PROOFING!!!!

CMON GUYS!

[DarkPenguin]

Wasn't mentioned in the "What's new" videos.  So I think you're screwed.

Whoa...please someone say it ain't true!  It has to be there....must be there......?  Maybe not in the public beta?  I would be pretty shocked if it wasn't available in the final release.

Todd in Chicago

[Tklimek]

No way.

I refuse to get lathered up over this.  Really.  I'm pretty sure.  I think.....

Just downloaded the beta and poked around and indeed, couldn't find anything regarding softproofing.  I'm sure the boys in the programmin' department are just putting the finishing touches on it...I'm sure of it....I think...maybe....  ;-)

Todd in Chicago

Wasn't mentioned in the "What's new" videos.  So I think you're screwed.

[Christopher]

No way.

I refuse to get lathered up over this.  Really.  I'm pretty sure.  I think.....

Just downloaded the beta and poked around and indeed, couldn't find anything regarding softproofing.  I'm sure the boys in the programmin' department are just putting the finishing touches on it...I'm sure of it....I think...maybe....  ;-)

Todd in Chicago

If true it's sad, that adobe doesn't get it. So far no reasons for an upgrade perhaps except the new "performance". However first it has to be proven that it really is faster.

After trying and using it for a few hours I'm SHOCKED. What in hell deserves the 3.0 ? No lens correction, no soft proofing, no real improvements to the pixel based editing.

[BernardLanguillier]

It seems that they have done a lot of work on the demoisacing and fine detail handling.

If true, I will look at Lightroom again.

Cheers,
Bernard

[Andrew Fee]

I haven't really had a chance to explore 3.0, but I'm also disappointed at the lack of a lens correction feature. It would be nice to get rid of PTlens and keep everything as RAW data in the one application.
 
Soft-proofing is not a feature that really affects me (though it can be useful to see when I've clipped saturation vs colour simply being outside my monitor's gamut) but it will be very disappointing if it doesn't end up in 3.0. I suspect it will be there though, maybe just not in beta 1.
 
That said, image quality seems drastically improved over Lightroom 2, at least with the high ISO images I've had a look at.
 
Here's a 100% crop from an image that was particularly bad in Lightroom 2:

 
And Lightroom 3's rendition:

 
It's a smooth white wall being hit with two different coloured lights, if you're wondering—I'm sure people will find much better examples, this was just an image that I remembered looking particularly bad.
 
This is with zero sharpening, no luminance noise reduction and 20 chroma noise reduction in each. All I did was import the image into Lightroom 3 and enable the new processing.
 

In the past I've also had quite a lot of images from my 1000D that showed a very obvious pattern in Lightroom 2, hopefully the new demosaicing will have removed that as well.
 

The only downside I've seen so far is that I'm going to have to redo my sharpening presets as it looks completely different now. (but it seems like it will be better)

[Josh-H]

I very much like the way you can choose in LR3 wether to convert your previous legacy RAW files that may have had substantial raw adjustments to them with the new RAW demosaic algorithm or not. Thats very cool. In other words... LR will not automatically update all my existing RAW files with its new algorithm that have been processed but not rendered out - which given there are going to be visual differences in the processing is a very good thing. Thats good support for existing LR users.

The improved demosaicing and noise reduction do indeed at first blush seem a very worthwhile improvement. As does the new import dialogue.

The film grain sliders... well.. I could have lived without those.

I wont install the BETA on my main mac pro image editing machine - but I have seen enough of it on my laptop that I think the upgrade is worth it for the improved algorithims alone.

The lack of soft proofing in the BETA is very disappointing howvever and I do hope Adobe is just teasing us and that it will be in the final 3.0 release 'Adobe says... Oh ye of little faith!' (well.. thats my hope anyway).

[Christopher]

I very much like the way you can choose in LR3 wether to convert your previous legacy RAW files that may have had substantial raw adjustments to them with the new RAW demosaic algorithm or not. Thats very cool. In other words... LR will not automatically update all my existing RAW files with its new algorithm that have been processed but not rendered out - which given there are going to be visual differences in the processing is a very good thing. Thats good support for existing LR users.

The improved demosaicing and noise reduction do indeed at first blush seem a very worthwhile improvement. As does the new import dialogue.

The film grain sliders... well.. I could have lived without those.

I wont install the BETA on my main mac pro image editing machine - but I have seen enough of it on my laptop that I think the upgrade is worth it for the improved algorithims alone.

The lack of soft proofing in the BETA is very disappointing howvever and I do hope Adobe is just teasing us and that it will be in the final 3.0 release 'Adobe says... Oh ye of little faith!' (well.. thats my hope anyway).

All good and well, but I still have the feeling that C1 has the edge to raw conversion. So no point in using Lightroom. Still need to do some more testing, just have a few limited raw files here.

I think especially real lens correction features should have been in 3.0. Softproofing would have been a kind of nice bonus.

[barryfitzgerald]

Not seeing this big improvement in high ISO images, still blotchy, still baseline NR that cannot be turned off..sigh. Raw therapee and C14 still miles ahead of it in this dept.
No softproofing
No distortion or perspective correction
The new import interface is just plain annoying IMO

But wow they add film grain..gasp!  

[ihv]

Any word about non-destructive third party plug-ins?

[Josh-H]

Any word about non-destructive third party plug-ins?

I think thats a big 'Wait and See'.

I use the Portraiture plug in from Imagenomic in my daily workflow - so I will not be upgrading to 3.0 on my main editing machine until support from Imagenomic catches up with LR3.0.

I think especially real lens correction features should have been in 3.0.

No doubt that will come (I am kind of surprised its not in 3.0 Beta, but would not be surprised if Adobe is holding an ace or two up its sleeve for official 3.0 release such as soft proofing or lens correction) - I am sure Adobe knows it is loosing customers to DXO in this dept.

Snip - From LL home page article (Hope Michael doesn't mind, but its an important statement)

More Features?
Be aware that LR3 Beta isn't the final product. There are quite a few features which are deliberately not included in this beta that will be included in the final version when it becomes available. This is the case for several reasons, among them that there are features which are still in development and not yet ready for testing, or which Adobe doesn't want competitors to be aware of until final release.

Something else in 3.0 that is really nice is the ability to view images on other hard drives or in other folders from the import dialogue like a file browser ala Bridge.

Edit - Whats with the high level Flickr integration? Are Pro's really using Flikr to share images with their clients? (I think my clients would find that most unprofessional).

[madmanchan]

Not seeing this big improvement in high ISO images, still blotchy, still baseline NR that cannot be turned off..sigh. Raw therapee and C14 still miles ahead of it in this dept.

Barry, if you are examining existing files (i.e., files with previous image settings), they will still be using the older LR 2 processing. You need to update to the new process version to use the newer LR 3 public beta rendering. In Develop, take a look at the histogram, specifically, the region to the top-left above the histogram. If there is a little gray warning icon there, then you're using the old rendering path. You can click that warning icon to move over to using the new processing. If you're still seeing problems, please post an example raw file and I'll take a look.

And in general, folks, please ... it's an early public beta. It's not feature complete. I understand some of you are not happy with what's not available at the moment, but I do genuinely believe it would be more productive and constructive to discuss the things that are there.

[michael]

No, Soft Proofing isn't there at the moment.

And I agree with Eric, recognize that this is still a product in development, and check out what is there rather than what isn't.

Michael

[barryfitzgerald]

Erik I have been switching between process version 1/2 as per the settings tab. I can see a notable difference in chroma noise reduction, much better with LR3. However there is only a minor difference in luminance noise, a little better than LR 2.5, but there is still obvious signs of base level NR going on (this is much more obvious when you increase sharpening), the artifacts are clear to see. Try this with other software vendors, such as C1 4, and the free Raw Therapee, which do not appear to be attempting to do any base level NR.

My point remains, I do not want "ANY" base level NR, nothing zero. Reasons are this, if I want to apply NR myself, it's lot more effective to remove very fine grain, than pre processed larger ones.

Appreciate it's not feature complete, however, I just want to point out distortion and perspective controls are long overdue.

[mike.online]

anyone notice that the mac version is 68mb and the windows is 120mb ?

different architectures, sure. But double the file size, whats up with that ? (in Ethiopia download = 12hours+  )

[jmccart]

After wasting 6 hours of my time on the phone, 9 emails, and billing be incorrectly for my
last upgrade which took 12 days to complete. I'll be switched if I'm heading down that road
again.  Adobe's customer no service is one of the worst I've encountered.  I'm sticking with
DxO and NIK with my workflow, which is far superior to anything in Lightroom or Photoshop.