Lightroom 3 released

[edG]

Adobe sent an email announcing the availability to purchase Lr3 with a 15% discount until June 18th- on the 20 the beta programs will cease functioning or so they say. Decided to take them up on their offer.

[JAS_Photo]

If you already have LR 2 you can upgrade for $99.00 U.S. Not too bad. I was thinking I would have to rebuy the whole thing and if that were the case I would have stayed with my current version. So, I upgraded and the upgrade went smoothly with all my files and previous presets intact. Some cool additions to the new version like adding grain. Jimmy, look out here I come!

[JAS_Photo]

OMG almost forgot the tether your camera to lightroom bit!

[F8&Bthere]

I went for the academic version again- you can't upgrade it to a new release for the discounted price, but works out to about the same in the end if you just buy the next release in education version again. I debated upgrading to the new version but the things I'm finding so far that make the upgrade worthwhile are:

1. That it handles/catalogs video files. No editing, but at least when I have a combination of video and still images on a memory card I can import everything at once now which I couldn't do with 2.x, and can find and view everything from within the LR interface.

2. The huge improvements to noise reduction and sharpening. I don't really need to go outside LR for these touch-ups anymore.

3. Also very cool in a bonus sorta way (although, like with NR and sharpening, I already had bought plug-ins and such to do these things with the previous version) are the lens corrections, Flickr export, adding grain, the refinements to vignetting, and watermarking functionality.

My one and only niggle so far is that it seems like I can't get the slideshow to play more than one audio track, which if I'm not mistaken worked fine in version 2. Seems like a glaring oversight and step backwards. Hopefully Adobe will correct that in a future update.

Now if only I could figure out how to easily apply the Nik Color Efex pro contrast filter/effect to a series of images upon import, in batch fashion, I'd be ecstatic.

[JAS_Photo]

The Nik Color Efex "pro contrast filter/effect" is a real nice filter by the way. It reminds me of a well printed film photograph in terms of colour and grain.

[F8&Bthere]

yeah, and it seems to automatically remove any colour cast in the image as well. I rarely find a photo that doesn't benefit from just using the default settings of that filter, which is why I wish I had the option to apply it as an import preset in lightroom. I guess I could tweak white balance and contrast/tone curve in Lightroom and accomplish a similar effect, but Nik Color Efex seems to do it automatically and intuitively near perfect every time.