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Friday, April 2nd, 2010service | Posted by Editor - Blog News Service

Adobe discusses latest Lightroom 3 Beta

Adobe Lightroom 3 BETA

Adobe Lightroom 3 BETA

Adobe has opened the second public beta of its Photoshop Lightoom 3 software for immediate download from its Adobe Labs site. Lightroom 3 will be based around a new processing engine and the second iteration adds luminance noise reduction to the color noise reduction options that appeared in the initial beta. The latest beta also supports tethered shooting for a number of Nikon and Canon DSLRs, enables importing and management of video files and improves overall functioning of the software.

Adobe today released an update to its Photoshop Lightroom 3 beta software, available immediately through Adobe Labs. Building on the success of the first Lightroom 3 beta, which was downloaded by more than 350,000 photographers, Lightroom 3 beta 2 incorporates feedback from the first iteration of the beta while offering users several new features and greatly improved performance throughout the application.

New features in this release include tethered shooting support for select Nikon and Canon cameras, the ability to import and manage video files from DSLR cameras for a streamlined workflow and additional behind-the-scenes architecture enhancements for faster importing and loading of images. The addition of luminance noise reduction to the color noise reduction options already available in the beta helps photographers achieve overall exceptional image quality from high ISO images. The import experience and watermarking functionality have also been modified to reflect feedback received from the Lightroom community during the first beta period.

The input from the photography community has been extremely valuable and Adobe would like to thank everyone who has participated in the beta program. Adobe encourages photographers to test this new selection of features and provide the product team with feedback so they can produce the highest quality final product.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom
Adobe Lightroom is the essential digital photography workflow solution, helping serious amateur and professional photographers quickly import, manage, perfect and showcase all their images in one intuitive application.

Pricing and Availability
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 beta 2 is available as a free download to anyone on a Macintosh or Windows platform and is available in 12 languages. Visit http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/lightroom3/ to learn more and download the second beta. Feedback can be submitted on the Lightroom forums: http://forums.adobe.com/community/labs/lightroom3/.

The start of the second public beta of Lightroom 3 gives the first glimpses at a new raw processing engine from Adobe. While at PMA 2010, we got a chance to speak to senior product manager and writer of Adobe’s Lightroom blog, Tom Hogarty about the Lightroom 3 public beta program and he told us about some of the changes that had been made. We also did some processing to see how it compares to the current version of Adobe Camera Raw.

The two focuses of the second phase of the beta process were, he explained ‘image quality and performance.’ With this in mind, for Lightroom 3 the team developed completely new image processing algorithms. However, they were aware of the need to avoid making them too processor-intensive – ‘we also needed to look at the performance at the same time and, of course, these two things are inter-related.’

‘A lot of our focus was on interactive performance – about not having to wait for things when you ask for them to happen. The flip-side of that is non-interactive performance – the performance of background tasks. The interactive performance was important for us because perception is a huge driver of performance.’

The changes made to the image quality mainly relate to fine detail. ‘We find a lot of people focus on sharpening and noise reduction characteristics. We’ve been doing a lot of work in these areas and that’s not over.’ The biggest changes in terms of processing options, through, are for low-light, high ISO images. ‘We’ve tried to reduce the color noise without losing sharpness or saturation – trying to avoid a ‘painterly’ effect. We turned on the new chroma aspects of noise reduction in the first public beta but turned off luminance NR to encourage beta testers to focus on color. The big news with this version is luminance NR and how they work together.’

The improvements in Lightroom 3 are big enough that it’s tempting to go back through your library to see how much better your old images will look – both your favorites and ones previously spoiled by noise. However, Lightroom will not force the changes on your back-catalogue – you’re presented with a choice of processing your images with the original 2003 profile or the latest 2010 version. ‘We can’t arbitrarily move you to the new version – we want to preserve it for people who’ve already made edits to their old images.’

The latest version also introduces a host of more subtle feature improvements, including different ‘blending’ modes for post-crop vignetting addition, greater control over customized watermarks, and tweaks to the behavior of the import function. These features join those that appeared in the first public beta, including the new import window and increased support for uploading and management on popular image hosting sites such as Flickr, Smugmug and Zenfolio, with metadata such as favorite counts and comments pulled down into Lightroom.

Beyond the changes to the existing Lightroom features are handful of new capabilities for the software, reflecting the changes in DSLRs. ‘We’ve added support for video – allowing you to categorize, add keywords and tags. It’s asset management of video files, not editing – we’re conscious of the risks of adding too many features too quickly.’

The other headline change is the ability to use Lightroom for tethered capture. ‘Initially we’ll be shipping with support for a limited number of Nikon and Canon cameras. We wanted to make it super-simple, showing the camera settings and allowing you to grab an image.’ For now, the company has decided not to offer the ability to change the camera settings from the software because, Hogarty points out ‘with the way interfaces have developed, it’s super-simple to change them on the camera.’

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