I’ve been using Lightroom 3 in one form or another almost continuously since the second beta release and the final release since the day it was announced. That said, I don’t think I’m going to write a full review of Lightroom 3. It really can be summed up as, “Lightroom 3′s is a lot like Lightroom 2, except for the addition of new behind the scenes features; namely the ability to correct for lens distortions (both geometric and perspective)”. There’s not a whole lot more to it.

In short, spending the time to carefully step though the program’s features, and functionality to put together a review would be largely pointless and look at lot like the review of the first beta. Never mind that a review isn’t going to get you the most out of the software anyway, and there are already several excellent books available that will do that much better than I can in a few thousand words.

That said, at the end of my last Lightroom 3 Beta 2 post, I made a few comments on what I’d like to see in Lightroom 3. Moreover It seems Adobe has broken a few things that worked in the beta.

The Good

Lightroom 3 did bring us lens corrections, I wanted this even though I didn’t think I’d use it, and now we have it. It’s funny in some ways that the availability of a tool will influence your use of the tool. Prior to Lightroom 3 I virtually never made corrections for perspective errors. Having to bring the photo into Photoshop tweak the perspective, then return to Lightroom, all the while creating a new, huge, 16-bit TIFF or PSD for the fixed image drove me nuts. With easy access to perspective corrections, I almost always fix perspective issues.

Moreover, the new lens correction is just too sweet to not use. No more vignetting (I never realized how badly some lenses vignette before), no more barrel and pincushion distortion, and no more futzing around trying to fix chromatic aberrations by hand on some images but not others. Needless to say, it’s probably one of my favorite new features.

The Bad (Okay, it’s not really that bad)

Let’s see, where to start.

How about with the new lens corrections again, namely access to user created profiles. They’re user creatable, easy to do, and Adobe has a community submission mechanism. Moreover Adobe has created a online community for submitting user generated profiles, unfortunately they aren’t accessible to Lightroom 3 users yet, only Photoshop CS5 users and then from inside though CS5. Nor is there a web interface, which would at least let us non-CS5 users download and install them manually.

Adobe’s position is that they ran out of time to add this functionality. Seriously? Not even enough time to hack together a website that presented profiles to download? Wow.

Missing from the Windows 7 taskbar menu is the recent catalogs list. See Update

Its minor but it’s an annoyance. The release version breaks the recent files section in Window 7’s taskbar context-menu. I should probably prefix this with I have Lightroom pinned to the taskbar on my machine. Being able to right-click on the icon and jump into any of my recently used catalogs (not that I have that many) was a nice feature. If memory serves, this worked in Lightroom 2, it also worked in the beta for Lightroom 3, it’s gone now.

Update: I just got around to installing Lightroom 3 on my laptop to see how it fared when the computer sucked (yes, my laptop sucked). Lo and behold, the recent items list showed up just fine when I right clicked on the pinned task-bar entry. So I uninstalled and reinstalled it on my desktop and there are now recent catalogs in the list. That was definitely a problem on my machine and not a problem with Lightroom 3.

I find performance varies quite a bit as well. Some things are quite snappy, maybe even faster than Lightroom 2, other things, not so much. One of my hopes was that Adobe would manage to get Lightroom to offload some of the processing to the GPU (remember, changes in develop have to be re-rendered continuously one way or another since Lightroom doesn’t blend pixels). The result of this is that some things, especially the adjustment brush, spot removal, and graduated filter tools can become quite sluggish.

Additionally I’ve run into problems with the previews and preview cache. However, these may have been my own doing. At times, the system would be sluggish even though the catalog was optimized and passed the integrity tests. Turns out somehow my preview cache (the <Catalog Name> Previews.lrdata folder) had been corrupted. Blowing it away and rebuilding standard previews—that only took 11 hours for 22,000 images—seems to have fixed that.

That specific problem aside, you still can’t scroll through the catalog (even with fully rendered previews) stop and have all the thumbnails sharp without waiting a moment.

There are a couple of other odd rather annoying quirks that Adobe didn’t fix either, though they’ve been around longer than just Lightroom 3.

For example when using the grid view on a second display, it doesn’t behave the same way as it does when on the main display (at least in Windows). First, it won’t respond to the scroll wheel to scroll by pages or at all. To scroll you either need to drag the scroll bar or hover over it and scroll with the wheel.

Secondly when you select multiple images in the gird you can’t preform an action on all of them in all cases. For example, selecting 6 images and hitting X to mark them as rejects works fine with the grid on the main display, but only flags the highlighted/active image when the grid is on the second display.

I’ve had no end of issues with merging catalogs with existing images and new virtual copies.

The Ugly

First off, I’ve had no end of issues with merging catalogs with existing images and new virtual copies. Even if the catalogs were both from Lightroom 3, I would get fatal errors trying to merge the two. This started out with my attempt at merging a converted Lightroom 2 catalog with my Lightroom 3 beta catalog. Namely since I couldn’t convert the LR 2 catalog in the beta, I was forced to re-import raw files into LR3 Beta if I wanted to play with processing them with the new engine.

Eventually, I managed to load enough files to play with that in the end it was more prudent to try and merge the catalogs than throw the work away or try and move it by hand. The odd part, I had tried merging catalogs in LR3 Beta 2 and Lightroom 2 and they both handled them the same way. Identical images (by path and name) were detected, and the develop settings were made into separate virtual copies. Importing a catalog with 4 versions (1 real + 3 virtual copies) of a given image into a catalog with 2 more versions (1 real + 1 virtual copy) would result in 6 versions of the image (1 read + 5 virtual copies).

Needless to say, it didn’t work; maybe it’s a bug, maybe it’s a “feature”. In the end, I decided to cut my losses, keep a copy of the old catalog around in case I needed to reference an image, and move all of my files via import (after an export with keywords) into the new catalog.

Lightroom 3 recognizes Camera RAW 5.7 as fully compatible, so it doesn’t render a TIFF/PSD and you loose all your lens corrections.

Lightroom, CameraRAW and Photoshop

I’m not sure if this is just bad or ugly but it is amazingly annoying. What I’m talking about is Adobe’s habit of abandoning development of previous generations of their software. In this case, its Camera RAW support for older versions of Photoshop when the new version comes out.

The latest, and probably last, version of Camera RAW for Photoshop CS4 is 5.7. What 5.7 lacks, likely among other things, is the lens correction features in Lightroom 3 and Camera RAW 6. However, Lightroom 3 recognizes Camera RAW 5.7 is being fully compatible, in other words it doesn’t prompt about rendering a TIFF/PSD and opening that.

What that means is that lens corrections made in Lightroom disappear when the image is opened in Photoshop.

What I’d really like to see is Adobe release a new Camera RAW for CS4 that fully supports the Lightroom 3.0 release. After that, I don’t care so much as long as they properly flag the Camera RAW versions and build TIFFs/PSDs in Lightroom, but half support like it stands is just bad.

Verdict

While Lightroom 3 is the 3^rd generation of Adobe’s Lightroom software, in some ways you have to treat it like the first release. Some of the changes/breaks in functionality, like the recent files missing in Windows 7, seems a bit strange to me. Moreover, the performance issues can be a bit grating at times, though I don’t remember Lightroom 2.0 being a speed demon either. Finally, there certainly are some odd quirks, though I’m not entirely sure if I’d call them bugs, at times.

That said, while I spent more time talking about problems than positive bits that’s perhaps not an accurate reflection of my opinion of Lightroom 3. Put it this way, there’s nothing remotely bad enough to make me even consider abandoning ship for something else. Lightroom still offers a workflow that’s heads and tails above anything else I’ve seen or tried. In my opinion, Lightroom is still the best mid-range digital asset management and RAW processing package available on Windows and possibly even on the Mac.

That said, there’s always room for improvement. I’d still like to see Adobe add GPU co-processing support to offload some of the heavy lifting when working in the develop module. I’d like to see a Capture 1 style focus mask, and I’d still like to see Dfine style targeted noise reduction. Of course anything that adds processing overhead brings us back to getting more performance out of the computer and GPU acceleration. I’d also like to see a somewhat open server back-end for handling catalogs and libraries in networked environments (though to say more might require a whole post on it’s own).

What is the biggest difference between Lightroom 3 Beta 1 and Lightroom 3 Beta 2?

It’s stable enough that I’m still using it 1-week later.

Not only is Beta 2 stable enough that I’m still using it, I’m actually using it more than Lightroom 2.6 at this point.

Noise Reduction

This is proving to be a tough nut for me to crack. In short, I like it, but it’s not quite that simple. For starters the new color noise reduction stuff rocks. It’s good enough to make a 1D mark 4’s ISO 102,400 almost useable.

That said, getting the most out of noise reduction in LR 3 is more complicated than it was in LR 2. What I have noticed is that I’m favoring using slightly higher luminance settings, lower sharpening and more masking in many of my images. I’m finding this necessary to bring out details while simultaneously keeping the backgrounds smooth and clean. For example, with my 1D Mark 3 I found that I could get away with no luma noise reduction in Lightroom 2, as long as I was shooting at ISO 400 or below. Lightroom 3’s new rendering engine tends to produce more grain even at those lower ISOs, necessitating some NR at a minimum.

New noise reduction (left) versus the old noise reduction (right) at the same settings. Image from a Canon EOS 1D Mark 3 at ISO 2500.

Unfortunately, I haven’t made any prints from Lightroom 3’s output yet, and that may change things somewhat. Specifically, since prints tend to appear to have more detail when there is a small amount of noise in the image.

Publishing

Publishing isn’t new to beta 2, it was there in beta 1, and provides an interesting if only somewhat half implemented (in my opinion) function.

In the default install, you can publish to a hard drive or to Flickr. Lightroom them manages the images and allows you to post and view comments to them without going to your web browser. If you have a Flickr pro account, which allows you to do in-place image replacements, you can also update images with development tweaks if you wish. Images that have been published also show their current comments in Lightroom’s Comment’s panel.

What hasn’t changed from beta 1, and I’m not sure if this is a limitation of Flickr or Lightroom, is the ability for the publish module to find images from Flickr that are in your image library by not published though the publish service. It may not be 100% successful, but I think it could at least make an effort to try and find images based on title, tags, EXIF data, date, etc. and give you the option to have those be added to the publish collection. It might not be 100% successful but at least it would be a start.

As for me, I find I’m trying to use publishing more especially since I’m trying to more regularly put content up on my Flickr feed. My minor quibbles, are just that minor quibbles.

Tone Curve

New to beta 2 is the much requested point tone curve in addition to the parametric tone curve. For me the point curve is certainly a nice feature, but I find in practice it’s limited in two ways. First, it’s small, dramatically smaller than the one in Camera RAW or Photoshop. On top of that, there’s no way to make it larger. This makes it somewhat difficult to make precise adjustments.

The second issue may or may not be an issue depending on your preference. The point curve is a luma curve like the point curve in Adobe Camera RAW and not an RGB curve like the curves tool in Photoshop.

I know the Lightroom and Camera RAW teams like to leap frog each other in features sometimes, the clarity tool comes to mind, this would have been a case where it would have been nice to see Lightroom jump ahead again, at least assuming that the DNG spec provides a way to do per-color curves.

Catalog Backups

One nice thing, though it’s quite minor, is that Adobe has moved when catalog backups are done. Now you are prompted when leaving the program as opposed to when starting it. To me this is a nice usability tweak, since I frequently want to get into the software quickly but I’m not so concerned with how fast it goes away when I’m done. Therefore, I won’t skip doing a backup simply because I needed to get to something fast.

Problems

I’ve encountered shockingly few problems in Lightroom 3 Beta 2 at least with the program itself. Of course, Adobe notes in the release notes, which Beta 2 is very close to the finished product. However, that doesn’t mean I haven’t run into issues, most notably with my Wacom tablet and the latest Windows 7 64-bit drivers. I think this is likely to be more of an issue with the Wacom drivers, and I’m currently working with Wacom to determine the exact cause, since the issues only show up in Lightroom for me (though not just in Lightroom 3 beta 2) I thought I’d mention it here.

The two issues are, on my dual monitor machine a pen confined to a single display behaves oddly when the active application is Lightroom. The second issue is that occasionally the tablet driver will crash necessitating a reboot.

Now I want to reiterate the point again, Lightroom 3 is still beta software, those of us testing it are going to be subject to random, sometimes bizarre, problems. In my opinion, it’s in our best interest to try and report as much of this information to the software companies so they can continue to improve their products. However, as I’ve said repeatedly when talking about Lightroom 3’s betas, this software really shouldn’t be used in production environments. Let the user beware, so to speak.

What I Wish Was There

Targeted Noise Reduction

One feature I really would like to see is something I saw implemented in a plugin called Define 2 from Nik Software. What Define 2 does is let you change the noise reduction levels in a way similar to Lightroom’s adjustment brush works, but differently.

Mostly I find myself wanting something like this because a lot of what I shoot has smooth out of focus backgrounds with a sharp subject. With Lightroom’s overall control, I have to try and balance the noise reduction requirements of the background (where I don’t have any detail I care about) with the need to preserve detail in the subject. This usually means using slightly less NR than I’d like to on the background and masking it to prevent what’s left from being sharpened.

If I could mask out the background and tell Lightroom to use noise reduction settings that are different from the images general noise reduction that would be really handy.

Distortion and Perspective Correction

This is becoming more and more important for me, and I think this is important to most serious photographers (professional or amateur). Lightroom currently can remove lateral chromatic aberrations and vignetting but can’t do anything for pincushion or barrel distortion or perspective errors. It would be very nice to not have to litter my drive with a ton of much larger TIFFs that can’t be deleted the way cached copies could be.

Focus Mask

Phase One introduced this in version 5 of their capture and RAW processing package, Capture 1. It was so interesting that I had to pull the demo just to check it out, and while I wasn’t completely blown away by it, it sometimes said areas were in focus when they clearly weren’t; it sometimes was handy to use.

Unfortunately, I found Capture 1’s interface so clunky and hard to use that there was no way I was going to move away from Lightroom for something like a focus mask.

As an aside, I’d really like to see this feature in cameras on the rear LCD so you can quickly tell what is in focus and what isn’t.

Other Stuff

I’m not entirely impressed with video support yet, though I guess at least being able to store and manage video files the same way as stills is better than nothing.

Tethered capture is also something that I was mildly optimistic over, after seeing it in the feature list. What I’m not thrilled with is the implementation so far. No control over the aperture or shutter speed, well at least I can’t figure out how to make Lightroom control the camera.

For me this is a rather annoying limitation since I can do this though Canon’s EOS Utility and just have Lightroom monitor and import form a folder directly. Additionally, if I have live view enabled on my Canon bodies, I can, through the EOS Utility software, drop into live view mode and adjust the focus without ever leaving my computer.

For me I consider the ability to adjust camera settings and focus (though live-view) to be essential parts of a tethered shooting setup. Therefore, while Lightroom’s tethered shooting is better than doing it the old way, it’s not as good as I think it should be.

Conclusions

I’m still only a week into using Lightroom 3 beta 2, but, so far, I really like what I see. I still wouldn’t recommend people run out and download the beta just because it’s still beta software, but Lightroom 3 promises to be a very nice package when adobe finally releases it.

When will Adobe release Lightroom 3? That I don’t know, but I can say for sure, there will be something out before beta 2 expires in June.

Last October (has it really been that long) Adobe released the first public beta of Lightroom 3. I previewed it here. My conclusion at the time was that due to the lack of features, Lightroom 3 beta was too raw to be useful. I even found it difficult to play with as an experimental software package; but there was certainly a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel. The beta showed a tantalizing look at a new rendering engine for Lightroom 3; one that pulled more fine detail out of images, couple that with a more advanced noise reduction system and you had a product that was hamstrung largely by its early beta status.

The new noise reduction algorithms do an excellent job cleaning up even ISO 1600 images from the Canon EOS 40D.

Beta 2 brings several new features and performance enhancements. Starting with improved performance and the completion of the new noise reduction system (both luma and chroma noise reduction is supported in the new RAW engine). Additionally, Lightroom 3 beta 2 supports previewing video files, though the support isn’t nearly as broad as I would have hoped, more on this later.

One other new feature since beta 1, is the ability to do tethered shooting directly from Lightroom with Canon and Nikon cameras. However, unlike Canon’s remote control app you can’t control any of the camera settings from inside Lightroom. The only available control is the shutter release. However, the UI is slim and it integrates well with Lightroom, so it’s not totally useless. Also, again since this is beta software, the camera control features may find their way into the final version.

Squashed Bugs and Performance

Beta 2 certainly doesn’t feel as beta as beta 1 did. In fact, it’s pretty snappy; at least as snappy as Lightroom 2 is on my machine. Many of the major bugs appear to be fixed as well. The import bug that dogged me in Beta 1 has been fixed. I’ve had no problems bringing files in from my hard drive.

Speaking of importing files, beta 2 still doesn’t have a mechanism for converting your Lightroom 2 catalog. This means if you’re a LR 2 user you have to re-import all your images into LR2, though obviously this is an in-place import, before you can start looking at and processing them. Unfortunately that means you also lose any adjustments you’ve made in Lightroom 2 so you have to reprocess a lot of things. I certainly expect the production release of Lightroom 3 to support migrating one’s catalog.

Lightroom 2 and Lightroom 3 in Parallel

Beta 2 still cannot import or convert a Lightroom 2 catalog. In short, beta 2 starts fresh. I don’t care for this situation as such, as I’d like to be able to go back and look at old images in a new Lightroom, so to speak. You can import your images in place into the new Lightroom 3 catalog; however, doing this poses some problems with respect to synchronizing edits between the old and new engines, or at least bringing forward your edits from Lightroom 2. In short, you can’t.

The best solution I’ve come up with for dealing with this situation is to work with the new catalog, either with no previous images or by importing your existing images in place. Then when Adobe releases a version of Lightroom 3 that supports converting catalogs, converting your old Lightroom 2 catalog and merging it (again in place) with your new Lightroom 3 catalog. Fortunately, Lightroom will deals with situations where the two catalogs have had images processed differently by creating virtual copies for each of the two methods so you won’t lose any new edits and you’ll finally have your old edits brought into the new catalog.

Doing this works well enough with multiple Lightroom 3 catalogs, so it should work just as well with a Lightroom 2 catalog that’s been converted too.

The other option is to write all your edits to the DNG or XMP files in Lightroom 2

before you import them into, or resync the folder after they’ve been imported, Lightroom 3 beta. However, this process won’t bring over virtual copies so it’s not entirely useful either.

Noise Reduction and Rendering

The new rendering engine really brings out fine details.

I was thoroughly impressed by the image quality that Beta 1’s new engine produced, beta 2 certainly doesn’t disappoint. Moreover, the addition of a fully function noise reduction engine makes beta 2 quite powerful and actually useful. The noise reduction algorithms are actually quite good as well. It certainly gives some new life to ISO 1600 and 3200.

Video Management

As much as I’d like to, I still don’t have the capabilities to shoot video yet. However, video is clearly becoming an increasingly important aspect of photography. Adobe is trying to make Lightroom 3 more capable of handling video, however, the current effort in beta 2 falls a little bit short.

What you can do is import video off a card and view a preview of the first frame in the filmstrip, grid or loupe views. However, you can’t yet watch anything in beta 2; when you click a video in loupe view it starts the default video player (in my case Windows Media Player) instead of just playing the video inside the Lightroom interface.

What I can’t find is anyway to do anything after that. There’s no obvious, though it’s entirely possible since I don’t have Premier, to have Lightroom send a video clip to a proper video editing program.

In many ways, Lightroom treats video as Flickr does, as extended stills. That’s not to say there’s anything wrong with that philosophy, though for now it seems like photographers doing serious video work will still have to keep their video workflow separate from their still workflow.

Of course, this is all still beta software, and video is new to beta 2, so that’s not to say any of this might not change in the time between now and release. One thing I would really like to see is video clips being plaid inside the loupe view in Lightroom and not being kicked out to another video player.

Preliminary Conclusions

I’ve only been playing with Lightroom beta 2 for a couple of hours now; however, I find it to be much more useable than beta 1 was. As such, I think this time, I may actually be able to put it thought its paces and really test it out. It’s not perfect and being that it’s still beta software, I wouldn’t suggest relying on it for production work. Though it certainly seems good enough to hack around in some.

One other thing to keep in mind however, Lightroom 3 Beta uses Camera RAW 5.7, which isn’t available yet (even in beta form). This means any work you want to take into Photoshop from beta 2 has to be rendered out as a TIFF or PSD before it can be worked on, at least if you want to take advantage of the new noise reduction and rendering engine.

Lightroom 3 Beta 2 can be downloaded from Adobe labs.

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.

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.

After a late night playing with the new Lightroom 3 beta, I’m back at it. This time we’ll look at what’s new in the library module, including the new Publish Services.

Disclaimer: Lightroom 3 is beta software, that means it’s not ready for production use and may have buggy, incompletely implemented or completely missing features. In the case of Lightroom 3 of these are certainly the case. It also means that problems seen now will likely be fixed by the final release.

The Library Module

The library module should be very familiar to Lightroom 2 users. Unlike the transition from LR1 to LR2, the changes this time are relatively minor, other than the new things added.

The library module, looks a lot like the one in Lightroom 2 and that's not a bad thing.

The left panel gets the new Publish Services pallet. I have to say, having only played with this for a few minutes, I’m already liking this over having to export and upload manually or with a plug-in. But more on this later.

Continuing around to the bottom panel, Adobe has removed the filter options from there, prefering to have you use the Library Filter bar across the top of the thumbnails to set those things. Speaking of the Library filter bar, and filtering LR3 changes things a bit. In LR2 filters were sticky to the folder or collection they were done in and Lighroom saved them if you navigated away from the folder. You couldn’t filter say all images that were shot with a specific camera, then navigate though a series of folders or collections and keep that filter active.

Filtering in Lightroom 3 acts in one of two ways. Either it stays how you set it or it resets to none any time you navigate to another folder, collection or publish service. This is achieved by way of the lock icon on the very right side of the Library Filter toolbar.

Personally I like this change, I always found it a bit odd in LR2 when I’d navigate to a folder I filtered some time ago and forgot about only to find that there were only 2 or 3 images showing out of what should have been many more. The new system makes a lot more sense to me.

Where the left panel pertains to where, the right panel still pertains to what. The only change here is the inclusion of a Comment panel which lets you post and follow discussions of images that are published to a service that supports that (for example Flickr).

A brief aside about the pallets in Lightroom 3. Like Lightroom 2, they can be expanded or collapsed down to just their title block, or you can right click on the title and hide the pallet completely. You can also run the sidebar in solo mode, collapsing all the pallets except the current one to just their title blocks. However, you still can’t reorder them. The left column is always Navigator, Catalog, Folders, Collections and Publish Services; the right; Histogram, Quick Develop, Keywording, Keyword List, Metadata and Comments in that order.

Lightroom 2 (bottom) and 3 (top) toolbars compared

Adobe has made some minor changes to the toolbar most notably the removal of the rather redundant “info” box that only showed the file name. I doubt this will make much of a difference anyway, as the file name is typically available in the metadata pallet, in the thumbnail frame and as an image overlay anyway.

Publishing

Publish services are new ways to push out files to a destination while keeping them in sync with Lightroom. The Lightroom 3 beta comes with two services “Hard Drive” and “Flickr”. Flicker ties in rather well to Yahoo’s Flickr service handling uploads and deletions.

Setting up a Service

Setting up services is obviously going to be slightly different depending on the service in question. In this case we’re going to look at setting up a Flickr service as that’s probably what’s going to be most used. At least I know it will be for me.

Clicking on the “Set Up…” text or right clicking on the title block and selecting “Create another … Connection” will bring up the Lighroom Publishing Manager dialog box.

Publishing Manager, the key to easy publishing.

One in the Publishing Manager, setup is much easier than I expected it to be. Give the service a name in the first box. Click “Log In” in the second, and that will take you to a browser window for Flickr that, if you’re logged in on your default browser, asks if you want to allow Lightroom to access the service. If you’re not logged in it will obviously prompt you to create an accout or log in.

After you authorize Lightroom to be able to access flicker, you can configure the rest of the settings, which are identical to the export settings in either the new export dialog or Lightroom 2′s export dialog with the exception of the last section that’s Flickr specific. When you’re done there, click the Save button and you end up with a named section in the Publish Service Pallet.

All told, it took longer to read this description than it actually does to setup Lightroom 3 to publish to Flickr.

Publishing

This is where things get interesting. Once you have Lightroom setup to publish to Flickr you can seamlessly manage what’s on Flickr with out actually having to go to Flickr.

First photosets behave much the same way collections do. You can create both normal photosets that you have to add files to manually, as well as Smart Photosets that work like smart collections automatically selecting images to publish form your library. You can also set a photoset as the default target, in lieu of the Quick Collection or any other collection.

Placing an image in a Photoset queues it up to be sent to Flickr. If you’re viewing the queue in the library Lightroom will show you which images are published and which have yet to be published. You can then publish them individually though the context menu or publish them in bulk using the publish button.

Viewing a Photoset in the grid shows the published and yet to be published images.

In addition the Comments panel on the right side now becomes useful. Selecting a photo in one of the Flickr Photosets will show the associated discussion in the comments panel. In addition you can use the Comments panel to add comments to the image and they get published to Flickr automatically.

Publishing to Flickr and results on Flickr

Publishing to Flickr Caveats

There are several caveats to the whole publishing process as it stands. Though this is still beta software so hopefully man will be cleared up before it goes gold.

The biggest issue is that Lightroom doesn’t seem to be able to retrieve information from Flickr. Specifically it doesn’t automatically get a list of existing sets. I can understand now importing and managing images that are already on Flickr but sets tend to be something frequently used. The apparent lack of bi-directional communication also hits in the comments box. In the screen shot above you can see that there is only one comment on Flickr but two show up in the Comments panel. This actually is the result of an interisting point of failure.

I had origionally added the image of the Mockingbird to my photostream before I created the Lightroom 3 set in Lightroom. I then added the image to that set from Flickr’s site and not though light room. When the change didn’t propagate back to Lightroom, I moved the image there too. In doing that, and republishing it I ended up with 2 copies of the image on my Flickr stream, one I subsequently deleted. The end result is that Lightroom apparently got confused and since it seems to keep track of the comments locally is showing both the comment on the new image, and the comment on the image that was deleted.

Conclusions so Far

So far, I’ve been very impressed with the features that Adobe has added to Lightroom 3. While I’m a bit disappointed that I can’t customize by moving panels around or redefining keystrokes yet, some of the new features are very nice.

The publishing system looks to hold a lot of promise, especially if the more commercial orientated sites (like Photoshelter or the micro stock sites) start offering modules that will let you publish directly to your catalog on their service.

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.