Lightroom 3 Released

Adobe has released Lightroom 3. I’ve been playing with the release version since late this morning and it’s certainly everything the Beta’s indicated it would be.

Adobe has priced Lightroom 3 out the same way Lightroom 2 was; $99 for the upgrade version, $299 for the full version. In addition there’s a 30% discount if you buy Lightroom 3 with Photoshop CS5 which make a reasonable deal if you need both of the programs.

That said, if you don’t actually need to do serious retouching you can probably save yourself a good chunk of money and skip Photoshop entirely at this point, especially since Lightroom’s new distortion correction (both profiled and manual) allows for fixing most of the things (geometric distortion and perspective correction being the big ones) with out taking images into Photoshop at all.

The only major problem I’ve found so far is with respect to importing and synchronizing catalogs. Since the beta couldn’t/wouldn’t convert an existing LR 2 catalog I ended up largely abandoning my main Lightroom 2 catalog while I was working with the Beta. My intent was to update and recombine it with my LR3 beta catalog when the release version came out. And testing in Lightroom 2 and 3 beta 2 indicated that I shouldn’t have a problem merging catalogs. What I found in practice is that Lightroom 3 is less than happy about merging catalogs with duplicate images or many duplicate images (not entirely sure yet), and importing the old catalog on top of my new catalog is throwing “unknown errors” and failing. As a result, I’ve lost most of my keywording and some processing settings (mostly virtual copies). Fortunately, I’m mostly able to recover from that (by writing edits and keywords to XMP files and re syncing that into the new catalog) but it’s proving to be more annoying than I anticipated.

If you’re upgrading form Lightroom 2 and never used the betas or kept your beta catalogs completely separate from your Lightroom 2 catalog, you should be good to go.