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.

Adobe has posted a video to YouTube showing off the full suite of lens corrections that will be in the final release of Lightroom 3 and CS5′s Camera RAW 6.Thought the demonstration is done in CameraRAW 6 the full set of functionality is supposed to available in Lightroom 3 as well.

To me, profile based corrections and the ability to control vertical and horizontal perspective distortions is huge. No more will have I have to take images into Photoshop just to fix a few minor but annoying distortions. The profile corrections handle geometric distortions, vignetting and CA which makes them a 1 click stop to produce a cleaned up image to start processing form. Even nicer, the profile based corrections can handle lens distortions that are more complicated than simply barrel and pincushion distortions.

Finally perspective corrections are an nice added bonus for fixing up those shots with annoying converging lines. Of course a perspective correction lens would be even better but Lightroom is ~$300 and good PC lens is ~$2400.

Watch Adobe’s Demonstration on Youtube.

Datacolor is offering an upgrade program for Spyder 3 Pro users wishing to upgrade to the new Spyder 3 Elite 4.0 software for only $99. While the update saves existing Spyder 3 owners from paying the full price of the Spyder 3 Elite–which is currently about $195, about $58 more than the Sypder 3 Pro at B&H Photo–looking at the overall price doesn’t make it so attractive in my opinion, though it’s certainly cheaper than buying a whole new colorimeter.

That said, the Elite 4.0 software does look to be an interesting upgrade, at least based on the marketing literature. The software appears to make calibrating multiple displays much easier, as well as offering some improvements in calibration accuracy. It also has a nice visualization of the display’s color gamut relative to several color spaces. In addition users with displays that lack brightness controls, like Apple’s iMac line, can now control display brightness though the Spyder 3 software.

Details on upgrading can be found on DataColor’s website here.

Adobe has released Camera RAW 5.7 and Lightroom 2.7.

As I reported earlier in the ACR 5.7 RC post, ACR 5.7 is necessary to bring images from Lightroom 3 Beta seamlessly into Photoshop CS4 for editing.

They can be downloaded from Adobe at the following locations:

Lightroom 2.7

• Windows
• Mac OS

Camera RAW 5.7

• Windows
• Mac OS

Adobe DNG Converter 5.7

• Windows
• Mac OS

Sandisk has started their spring rebates again when buying two identical select cards. Qualifing cards include Extreme III SDHC cards in 4GB, 8GB, 16GB and 32GB sizes (30MB/s) and Extreme CompactFlash  (400x/60MB/s) cards in 8, 16, and 32GB sizes, though not Extreme Pro Compact Flash cards.

The rebate is available through most major photo retailers and can be up to $70 (for two 32GB compact flash cards). The fine print says 2 cards per rebate form (which is what you need to qualify) and up to 3 rebate claims per household.

The rebates are provided as prepaid Visa cards and the promotion runs until July 3, 2010.

I have to say I’m getting excited. The AC-3 zone controller is, for me, the single most anticipated part of LPA Design’s Pocket Wizard Control TL, that is the TTL Pocket Wizards, system, and it’s arrival is getting closer and closer.

For those that haven’t been following the news, the Zone Controller, provides a simple, efficient way to control up to 3 channels worth of strobes in 1/3 stop increments from -3EV to +3EV (or 1/1 to 1/64 in manual) from your camera with out having a ST-E2 or 580Ex mounted on the camera.

Actually the AC-3 offers quite a bit more range, since the AC-3 Zone Controller honors the Flash Exposure Compensation set by the camera or on the flash directly. FEC set on the camera will shift all the zones by that much, so -3 EV on the AC-3 and -3 EV on the camera will drop the flash 6EV. FEC set on the flash will affect that flash only, with the results being similar but more specific.

For Canon shooters it gives an unprecedented level of control, since it lets you control the zones using EV and not ratios. This is huge since many modern lighting setups don’t neatly fall into the key:fill + background setup Canon’s flashes use.

The AC-3 Zone Controller is expected to retail for just under $70, which makes it a steal too, and ship for the Canon TTL Pocket Wizards in late May.

Rob Galbraith has a nice preview of the AC-3.

The latest news from LPA Design’s Product Updates for April 2010

Adobe Labs has released release candidates of Camera RAW 5.7 and Lightroom 2.7. Camera RAW 5.7 is a necessary update for those using Lightroom 3 beta 2 and wanting to import images into Photoshop without the intermediate step of converting to a TIFF or PSD file.

Adobe Labs – Camera RAW 5.7 RC

Adobe Labs – Lightroom 2.7 RC

I’ve got CameraRAW 5.7 RC installed and so far I haven’t had any problems, though I can’t say I’ve put it though any kind of serious testing. Editing an image from Lightroom 3 Beta 2 no longer prompts you to create an intermediate tiff though which is nice. If you are using Lightroom 3 Beta 2 and Photoshop CS4 I recommend trying the ACR 5.7 RC.

With the stability and performance of Lightroom 3 Beta 2, and a probably silly desire to walk on the line of beta software, I’m skipping the Lightroom 2.7 RC. I don’t see any reason to use it unless you like testing Adobe software since the final release should be coming along soon enough anyway.

I’ve been watching the progress of this with some interest since I first saw it announced on DP review. US based Noktor, an new player in the lens market, is releasing their first product a 50mm f/0.95 manual-focus manual-aperature lens in micro 4/3rds mount. With an effective focal length of 100mm on u4/3rds the lens might be a bit long, but for $750 you can’t really beat the price; the only other f/0.95 lens I’m aware of on the market right now is Lieca’s 50mm Noctalux and that’s $10,000.

If the image and build quality is there, I can see this lens making some inroads in street photography and making the u4/3rds system very attractive to that market.

• Read the announcement at DPReview
• See a preview at Steve Huff Photo
• Noktor’s Homepage

You can’t say that technology isn’t moving at anything less than a frightening pace. I use to think it was cool, at this point I feel like I’m constantly struggling to keep up. Photography has morphed into a combination of photography and videography that’s slowly gaining an ever growing emphasis on video especially in journalism. Now the major magainze publishers are looking to take their magazines into the digital age as well.

Of course who can blame them. In our world of short attention spans and an ever increasing desire for what’s shiny, still images and paper magazines are becoming increasingly problematic to sell.

Even worse the rest of the world is seemingly waging a virtual two pronged attack against the traditional media with social media on one side and bloggers on the other. Couple that with the ease of duplicating digital content and the widespread perception that everything online should be free and it becomes hard to see ways to add enough value to traditional media to keep people paying.

Recently though, it seems that at least two major media companies have started investigating ways to present their content in a format that takes advantage of the digital medium. However, I fear the idea of a digital magazine will ultimately go nowhere partly for technical reasons and partly because they won’t have the foresight to really embrace the digital medium.

Digital magazine technology was recently demoed by Time Inc. for Tech Curnch and it appears there might be a bright idea buried in it, even if I think it’s doomed. It appears in the case of the Time’s prototype, to leverage a widely available framework (Adobe Air which is based on the ubiquitous Flash environment) to present the digital magazine on top of a commodity computing platform (in this case a HP tablet computer).

The choice of technology poses hope that it might succeed, but the real question lies in how they handle the content.

On the up side, their solution appears to run on top of a regular computer. That makes the device flexible, and that’s a good thing to me. It also means you wouldn’t be limited to their tablet or reading just their digital magazines either. In fact, Tech Crunch goes on to point out that it could theoretically be ported to the iPhone.

Of course there in lies the first technical hurdle. A paper magazine’s page size is fixed and content is laid out around that. If a digital magazine tries to use that same assumption, especially if it can be displayed on different resolution devices you have a problem. Moreover an interface that works on a multi-touch tablet won’t necessarily work on a mouse driven computer.

The choice of content to make available also poses problems. The need for color and video excludes the use of eInk displays, like those used on the Amazon’s Kindle, since they aren’t color and can’t refresh fast enough for video. Without eInk, the benefits of the printed page (resolution, contrast and no battery needed) and the eInk reader (great battery life) mostly go away as well. If one of the complaints of the web is that people don’t like reading on a computer screen not being able to use eInk isn’t helping.

For me, if I have to lug around a laptop or tablet and not a sleek reader like the Kindle or Nook, it’s not that great of a deal anyway. Worse, if I’m stuck at my desk I’m not getting much over either a traditional web page or a printed magazine. That leaves the only real advantage being the potential for video content. Which is why, as much as I like the idea, I doubt it’ll be successful.

Of course the real reason I brought this up, is that as a photographer I’d be very excited to see a more wide spread way to present higher quality images and video to the population at large. And for that, I think it’s only a mater of time before high-resolution low-power color touch-screen tablets are as ubiquitous as cell phones. While I think a digital magazine may be doomed now. Eventually the hardware will be cheap enough and someone will stumble on the right killer app and we’ll be off to the races. But unless companies take their first formative steps in that direction now, it may never happen at all.

I just heard about this, but Adobe has made available for public beta the next version of Photoshop Lightroom. I haven’t had the opportunity to install it yet, but the some of the new features look promising.

The top features, at least according to Scott Kelby are

1. Redesigned Importing
2. Drag and Drop publish to the web
3. Pro-level noise reduction
4. Built in film grain feature
5. Better vignetting
6. Improved sideshow export options.
7. Watermarking
8. Far more flexible print layouts
9. change the background color of printed pages
10. Collections panel in the develop module

I’ll be posting a more substancial report of the new features and changes when I get it installed and can put it though it’s paces.

Of course, if you download and install it now, it’s important to remember this is still a beta release, it may not be completely stable and certainly wont be as fast as the final product will be.

Finally here are a couple of links to help get things rolling.

• Points in Focus.com’s Testing of Lightroom 3 Beta
• Adobe Labs Lightroom 3 Beta Page
• NAPP Lightroom 3 Learning Center