Lightroom 3 Beta:
Slideshow, Print and Web Modules and Watermarking

This time we delve into the side of Lightroom that I don’t use more than occasionally, Slideshows, Printing and Web gallery production.

Quite possibly the best new feature is support for proper water marking with out having to resort to tricky export plug-ins or Photoshop droplets. Neither of which were always foolproof or 100% reliable in my experience.

Slideshow

The Slideshow module remains relatively unchanged. The one new and well deserved feature is the ability to export a MP4 video of the final slideshow. The video can be produced at resolutions from 230px to 1080p high def, I’m not sure of the utility of the smallest sizes, but the larger ones are certainly welcome.

The file appears to be an H.264 encoded MP4 with the sounded encoded using the MP4a codec. What you do from there is up to you. You could use DVD burning software to covert it to standard def MPEG-2 video and burn it to a DVD-R for viewing on a DVD player. Of course if you go this route, there’s little reason to render the slideshow in anything other than the 480 preset. The same conversion process could be done to a bluray disk for the high-def formats to produce a Bluray player ready movie.

Of course there’s always the ability to upload the slideshow video to a website or e-mail it to a client.

The real problem, I see, is that without other software to convert the video into something playable natively on a TV, there’s little use in generating the video file especially since it isn’t nearly as controllable as either the PDF slideshow or running the slide show from Lightroom. To me, the feature would be a lot more useful if there was a native “burn a DVD/BD of this video” option that let you make something easily distributable and broadly viewable with out 3rd party software.

Web

There’s not a whole lot of difference in the web module.

To be honest, I’ve always wondered about the web gallery module a little. I think most people that are using Lightroom are also going to be using a service (Flickr, Smugmug, Photoshelter, etc.) or some form of automated gallery software (Zenphoto, Gallery2, etc.) for their web galleries. About the only real use I see for the web module is to create a quick HTML gallery that a client could browse through off a CD.

The new web module doesn’t appear to offer any radical new features.  Other than the ability to watermark photographs, which is a globally supported new feature in Lightroom 3. The page layout, information and design options are all pretty much the same as what is available in Lightroom 2.

Print Module

The most obvious new feature is the custom package. The difference between the new custom package layout and the old picture package layout is that the new layout style appears to support overlapping pictures better.

What’s still missing is soft proofing. This, in my opinion, is far more important than more flexible picture layouts. Without soft proofing, color critical print work must still be exported to photoshop and printed from there. The need to shift to Photoshop to soft proof and make print adjustments to me renders many of the advantages of Lightroom’s non-destructive RAW workflow, especially the use of virtual copies to save disk space, more or less useless. I have no idea if Adobe is going to add softproofing to Lightroom 3 before it’s released, but I would really hope so.

Watermarking

This probably should have been in Lightroom 1, let alone having to wait for Lightroom 3. However, it’s here now, and with a few caveats works well enough to be useful.

First the positives. The new watermarks can be applied to just about anything produced, except slideshows, that means prints, exports and web galleries. They can be text or graphical with controllable transparency. Finally, they are automatically scaled to fit the image properly.

The only negative I’ve found so far is the inability to rotate the watermark in less than 90° increments. That is if you want “Sample” to be placed diagonally across the image you can’t do that using a text watermark yet. Of course since this is still a beta, there is always the possibility that the configuration options available so far aren’t fully representative of the final release.

Either way though, the new watermarking system is easy to setup and easy to apply to exported images, much more so than the old LR2 + morgify + configuration black magic (I never could get it to work successfully) was.

Conclusions

The big changes to Lightroom 3, the new rendering engine and the professional level noise reduction are, in a word, awesome. Actually the new rendering engine, as slow and unoptimized and buggy as it is, is a big enough improvement over the one in Lightroom 2 that I find my self wishing Adobe was releasing Lightroom 3 sooner rather than later.

The various minor upgrades and tweaks, are for the most part nice. Watermarking looks like it works well and is much more usable since you don’t have to jump though hoops to use it. Publishing looks like it’s going to be a pretty powerful solution for exporting and being able to track what has been exported, the ability to intergrate with online communities and comment directly from Lightroom is just a plus on top of that.

However, the lack of soft proofing in the print module is still troubling, though. Softproofing is an absolutely critical step in the fine-art print production process and with out it Lightroom still forces you back to Photoshop and multiple copies of the same file for printing.

All told, if the beta is any indication, Lightroom 3 is going to be a very nice upgrade from Lightroom 2, especially in image quality. However, in it’s current state it’s very rough around the edges. It’s certainly less useable than I recall the beta of Lightroom 2 being.

My recommendation: If you’re interested in playing with bleeding edge features and don’t mind dealing with the performance issues, the beta is worth a try, at least to see what’s coming. Otherwise, most photographers should probably skip the beta entirely.