Lightroom 3 Beta

I finally have Lightroom 3 installed and I’ve made a cursory run though the software. So this is the first look at what’s new, what works, and what’s broken right now. Some things look quite good, other are broken.

The biggest problem I’ve seen so far is that importing appears to be majorly broken. Imports though the Import dialog, especially those that require copying files from a media card, choke immediately. In fact the only way I’ve been able to get files into Lightroom 3 is though the folder synchronization and Import -> Add methods. Neither of which are always successful.

Update 2009/11/14: The Import bug that breaks imports has to do specifically with renaming files. If you import and do not rename Lightroom 3 beta has no problem Importing images from cards.

Lightroom 3 Beta is beta software, this means it’s intended for testing and not complete. This release is very rough around the edges, far more so than Lightroom 2 felt when it was released as a public beta. I would not try and use this for anything but testing, in fact some issues in the beta make even that difficult.

Installation, Preferences and First Look

First, Lightroom 3 beta installs along side of Lightroom 2, so you don’t have to worry about Lightroom 3 replacing your production software. In fact, that would be very bad, since LR3 isn’t nearly as feature complete as I seem to remember LR2 being when it was first released to public beta.

LR3 is, however, smart enough to pick up your preferences from your existing install, if you have one. This mean that the first time in LR3 had picked up my metadata and development presets. My development defaults may also have been picked up, but I can’t tell for sure since the importing seems to be flaky at best and partially broken at worst.

Ahhh, the smell of fresh pixels right out of the box. The familiar but slightly different splash screen and the new Library module in the default state.

Speaking of importing, the Import dialog is one of the largest and most obvious changes in Lightroom 3 Beta. I’m not sure yet, if it’s a positive change or not, but it does expose a lot more options in terms of naming imported files and directing them to where you want them.

The New Import Dialog

Like Lightroom 2, the Import dialog has 2 modes a compact mode and an expanded mode that shows previews. The compact mode also simplifies many of the naming and subfolder orginizational options and presents things in a slightly more clean interface.

Touring  The Compact Import Dialog

The compact import dialog in Lightroom 3.

Starting in the upper left corner is the import source. In this case it’s showing my compact flash card reader and it defaults there if there is a card in it. If a media reader isn’t available, the default source appears to be pointed to a local hard drive instead. Mousing over the import source will highlight it and rotate the arrow to point down. Clicking brings up a menu allowing you to select another source from a favorites list and recently used sources.

Moving to the right following the arrow, we have the “action” area. This is where you tell Lightroom what it should do with the files it finds in the import source. In Lightroom 2 this was the drop down menu at the top of the import dialog. The options are:

• Copy as DNG – copy the file from the source and convert it to Adobe’s open RAW format DNG
• Copy – copy the file from the source and leave it in the camera makers proprietary RAW format
• Move – moves the files from the source to the destination, deleting them from the source location
• Add – adds the files to the catalog while leaving them right where they are on the disk.

The import dialog only presents you with the options that make the most sense with one apparent caveat. In the case of flash media, the move and add options are disabled to prevent you from adding files to the catalog that persist on your computer. The odd one is moving from a media card, you can’t apparently do that and that would seem to offer a way to clear the card for it’s next use.

Finally the last part simply tells you where the files are headed. If you have Copy as DNG, Copy or Move selected you can click on the destination side and change where things will go. If you have Add selected, it will read My Catalog and nothing will happen as the files wont be moved anyway.

Across the bottom we have the some more options. The first two icons, on the left, toggle what the bottom half will display. The ‘i’ with the circle around it will show information about file handeling, renaming and what metadata will be applied. The preference icon below it will let you change those settings. The metadata preset and keywords fields work the same as they did in the LR2 import dialog.

The dark area on the bottom that reads Preset and none is where you can select the develop preset that will be applied to the image after import.

The last area in the small dialog is the where you can control how the images will be placed on the target drive. As of yet, I’m still havingi problems getting an import form a flash card to work so I’m still at a bit of a loss as to what they do exactly. I assume that organize does what it did in Lightroom 2 offering “By Date”, “Origional Folders” and “Into one Folder” options. Date Format, which is only visible when “Organize” is set to “By Date” appears to be the date options split out of the Organize field in LR2.

Expanding the Import Dialog

Clicking the square down arrow button in the lower left corner expands the small dialog into the large dialog shown above

The new expanded dialog shows not just thumbnails, but exposes significantly more functionality than the old one did.

The expanded form offers a lot more options. For starters the left column shows all possible sources on the current computer, including mapped network drives. They can be expanded in a tree style allowing the selection of one or more folders.

The center is obviously where the thumbnails are displayed. Some new eye-candy Lightroom 3 adds is to how it displays checked and unchecked files. Unlike in LR2 where you had to rely on the just a thin border around the selected images and the check box, Lightroom 3 now ads a vignette to the unselected images making it readily obvious that they aren’t selected with even a quick glance.

Lightroom 3 has apparently removed the the ability to check or un-check groups by date. However, the new dialog offers a loupe view mode and the ability to sort thumbnails by date, checked state and file name as a consolation prize.

Right clicking on a thumbnail gives you the option of Importing the file strait away or opening it in a Finder/Explorer window.

Along the right side, we have the advanced file handling options. Many of these were in LR 2, some are new. The top pallet gives control over preview sizes, duplicate exclusion and backing up files to a second drive.

The second pallet down controls how the files get renamed on import. New to LR3 is the ability to add a shoot name to your naming sequence. The Shoot name appears to behave just like a second custom text field.

The Apply During Import pallet,handles the attachment of keywords and metadata and a development preset. The final, Destination pallet allows you to select the destination for the files if they are being moved or copies.

First Thoughts

Bearing in mind that LR 3 is beta software I have to say this. The new import dialog is slow. Though I expect that will be fixed by release. The ability to easily preview potential imports, including enlarged loupe views, could come in handy. Though at the same time, I’m not sure exactly how useful it will be, at least for me, since I edit after I import not before.

On the other hand, I think I’m going to miss the ability to exclude or include images by date, since that is something I do use frequently. Also like LR2, you can select a group of images and check and un-check them all simultaneously but clicking the check box for any single image in that selection. However, you still have to find the starting and ending image for a given day to duplicate LR2′s ability to include or exclude images by date.

There is of course one other caveat in this, and again remember this is beta software. I have yet to suceede at getting LR3 to copy an image and import it from a memory card. I can add images already in place to the catalog, with the Add operation, but using the copy operation results in Lightroom doing nothing and ceasing to allow me to reopen the import dialog with out restarting the program.