Lightroom 3 Beta:
Develop Module

There have been a few changes to the new develop module, one major the rest relatively minor. The minor changes are mostly UI tweaks that give greater control over operations on the images, such as auto-synchronizing settings between images and access to the Collections panel.

The major change is a much improved rendering engine, and I mean improved. Lightroom 3′s new engine is more capable of extracting fine detail out of images and handles sharpening them much better with out making them blocky. In addition, there is now more refined control over post-crop vignettes and a new film grain effect.

The new Development Module

UI Changes and New Features

The first change is the inclusion of the collections section on the left panel, in fact the. I’m not sure I see the utility in this, but at the same time since it can be minimized or completely hidden from the panel it’s not bad and certainly contributes to consistency–it’s available in every other module–as well as increased customization.

Compirason of develop panels between lightroom 2 and 3 (click to see animation).

There’s not a lot of big differences in the develop panels. At least not until you get down towards the bottom. Adobe has recognized the Detail and Vignette panels into 3 new panels.

Details still handles sharpening and noise reduction. Lens Correction, now has the CA correction from the old Detail panel and the lens vignetting correction. Finally the post crop vignetting has been moved into the new Effects panel, along with a new film grain effect.

Speaking of vignetting, the new post crop vignetting provides two modes, color and highlight priority which control how the vignette affects the areas it covers. There is also a new contrast slider for black vignettes that can be used to preserve some of the brighter details that are being covered up.

Of the two effects I think the film grain effect might be even more useful for one of two reasons. First its a new creative effect, lending for well increased creativity, and that’s always good for creative people.

Secondly, I find that many very noise free digital captures, especially those with large areas of smooth color can almost look fake. Adding grain, which is essentially controllable noise, helps break that up and produce, to me a more pleasing image.

Rendering Engine

The big improvement is the new rendering engine. One of the problems pixel peepers and large image printers had with Lightroom 2 was some of the artifacts the rendering engine introduced. There have been several posts around the blog-o-sphere complaining about Lightroom producing odd artifacts and producing blockyness in images. This doesn’t tend to be an issue for people printing small (say 11×14 and smaller) images. However, for the people who print large (say 16×20 or better yet 20×30) the artifacts lead to a less than optimal print.

The most noticeable thing of the new rendering engine is the improvement in how it handles edges and details. Below are two 100% crops of an image rendered using exactly the same settings in the old and new rendering engines (mouse over the image to show the version from Lightroom 3).

While the effect is most noticeable in the eye, and light breast feathers, it’s also visible in the feathers in the lower left corner. (See another example, this time in small rock detail.)

Note: The images above are from the same image with identical settings, a virtual copy was created and rendered using the old engine instead of the new one. For those testing Lightroom 3, you can change rendering engines in the Develop Module by going to the Settings menu and changing the process version.

Stability and Speed so far

Again, this is beta software, and it likely hasn’t been optimized yet, but at the same time I want to comment about stability so far.

Over the past couple of days I’ve had Lightroom 3, and my pathetically small test catalog open and running for extended periods of time (several hours at a clip usually) and I haven’t seen a problem in terms of stability (it hasn’t crashed or otherwise behaved strangely, other than importing from a media card, yet) and has been very snappy. I’m also not seeing a drop in performance With that being the case, I’m currently in the process of bringing in the remained of my ~19,000 image catalog to see how it behaves with that.

In fact, one thing that I’ve been rather pleased with is LR3 seems to be a tad snappier when switching between module, though it’s certainly possible that it’s all in my head. However, going to develop from grid seems ever so slightly faster.