lightroom 3

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 is the best tool to help professional photographers in managing thousands of digital images and doing post production work. Unlike multipurpose Photoshop, Lightroom was created around photographer’s workflow and it’s made to be ultimately efficient and fast. Lightroom consists of modules which are in fact steps in photography workflow: Library – image collection review and organization, Develop – non-destructive RAW and JPEG file editing, Slideshow – tools and export features, Print – layout options and preferences, Web – automatic gallery creation and upload. Lightroom presets for image enhancement or creative effects can be applied to multiple photos in a bunch. The newest version, Lightroom 3 brings in multiple improvements and new features to make already good software even better.

Speed Up

Adobe rewrote much of the underlying code for Lightroom 3, so even if you have very large image collection thumbnails appear as sharp as they should be from the first second. Common operations such as switching between modules, applying adjustments in batch, exporting images are much faster in comparison with previous Lightroom version.

Image importing

With Lightroom 3 you can set and forget all your import options: add or move the files to the Lightroom library, apply adjustment presets, file renaming, etc. You can now zoom to full size images stored on memory card during import which is good to skip blurred or other photos of not acceptable quality. The newly designed import interface is easy to set up and navigate, with clear visual indications of where your photos will be located and how they’ll be organized after you’ve imported them.

lightroom import

Noise reduction

Noise reduction in Lightroom 3 is on par with the best Photoshop denoise plugins. If you shoot a lot at high ISO settings this Lightroom feature will be lifesaver for you. Noise reduction in Lightroom provides natural looking results without losing details of the original or messing up with colors.

lightroom noise reduction

Tethering

If you’re studio photographer, you’ll find invaluable this new Lightroom feature. Now you can connect your camera with a USB or FireWire cable and actually control the shutter release from the computer and instantly import them into Lightroom. It’s perfect for highly detailed check of your shot, the lighting, or the shooting setup.

lightroom tethering

Flickr/Facebook integration

With Lightroom 3 you can share your photos instantly on Facebook, Flickr and SmugMug. Even if you shoot in RAW, Lightroom will convert it behind the scene and upload to your photostream. The most impressive is that you get updates on rating and comments of your photos right inside Lightroom.

lightroom flickr

Image watermarking

In Lightroom 3 you can easily embed text or logo watermark in your images. It provides flexible options for customizing copyright look such adjust size, position and opacity.

lightroom watermark

Lens and perspective correction

Lens correction in Lightroom 3 will automatically fix vignetting, lens distortion and chromatic aberration. Lightroom supports selected lens only, but you can create and use your own profile if it’s not supported by default. Perspective correction adjusts the vertical and/or horizontal transformation to remove perspective distortion.

lightroom lens correction

Flexible print packages

Now you can use highly customizable print layouts and save them as reusable templates. It works as easy as drag and drop photos into the new custom print layout creation tool and resize or reposition them as you like.

lightroom print

Lightroom workflow
To get started with Lightroom quickly check out free official Lightroom getting started guide (PDF) and video embedded below. Unlike other Adobe apps, Lightroom is really easy and intuitive to use so you won’ have any problems with that.

Lightroom wishlist

– Face recognition to sort photos by person
– Geotagging to easily embed location data into photo so they can be sorted by location
– High Dynamic Range photography to make HDR photos within Lightroom
– Panoramic stitching to combine multiple shots into a single panoramic view

Verdict: Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 is absolutely must have if you’re photographer working on a constant basis with organizing and post processing of hundreds of images and you need a powerful and efficient tool based on the typical workflow of photographer. If you already purchased the previous Lightroom version, Lightroom 3 new features is well worthy the upgrade.