(LR*3)+(B*2)=POWER: Lightroom 3 Beta 2 Is Here!

It’s here! Adobe released Lightroom 3 Beta 2 earlier and there are some nice goodies to play with in Beta 2. Grab it from Adobe Labs now! And if history teaches us anything, Adobe is saving a few tricks up their sleeves for the final release of Lightroom 3. There’s still no official information regarding the release date for the final version or what the eventual pricing might be. But in the meantime we have new features to try out.

One place to watch and get up to date Lightroom information is over on the Lightroom Journal Blog published by the Lightroom team. Stop by for news.

In the release notes the Lightroom team has this to say about Beta 2:

The team would like to thank the 350,000+ photographers who have downloaded the Lightroom 3 beta and provided feedback on the new improvements. We’ve worked on improving several key areas and have prepared a second public beta of Lightroom 3 as we get closer to our final release. Because this public beta is closer to our final release we are more focused on receiving feedback on the improvements we’ve made since the original public beta. And more importantly, by utilizing broader testing from a larger community of photographers we can help ensure that you can trust the quality of the final Lightroom 3.0 release.

As per our first public beta we went back to the drawing board and revisited what we believe are the fundamental priorities of our customers: Performance and Image Quality. The Lightroom 3 public beta had been stripped down to the “engine block” in order to rebuild a performance architecture that meets the needs of photographers with growing image collections and increasing megapixels. The raw processing engine also received an overhaul right down to the fundamental demosaic algorithms that now allows unprecedented sharpening and noise reduction results. The feedback has been very positive but there were certainly areas where we received some valuable “tough love” and we’ve addressed that feedback in this update.

In addition to tweaks and bug fixes some of the new features in Lightroom 3 Beta 2 are:

• Improved performance throughout the application
• In application tethered shooting for select Canon and Nikon DSLRs
• Luminance Noise Reduction is now active
• Support for importing and managing video files from DSLRs
• Improvements to the Import feature
• Watermarking functionality has been greatly enhanced

Over the next several days Brian and I will explore some of the new features in more detail so stop back for more Lightroom 3 Beta 2 information.

Looking for more? Check out the posts from these other Lightroom experts:

Jeffrey Friedl

Victoria Bampton

Rob Sylvan

Mark Wilson

Ian Lyons

Richard Earney

Seán McCormack

Gilles Theophile (in french)

Enjoy!

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