Lightroom 3 has been out in the wild now for just about a month now. If you have questions or need a little training assistance here are a few places to look.
I had the pleasure of writing an article for Photoshop User magazine’s July/August 2010 issue. The topic is the new noise reduction technology in Lightroom 3. If you aren’t familiar with Photoshop User magazine, it is published by the National Association of Photoshop Professionals (NAPP) and is sent to all members. The magazine is also available at major book stores. Click here for a PDF of the article and enjoy!
If you haven’t yet investigated the benefits of becoming a NAPP member you should! At only $99 a year it’s a real bargain. Besides the subscription to the magazine you have access to hundreds of video tutorials, tips, tricks, and other things to enhance your Photoshop and Lightroom skills. NAPP also offers an extensive array of discounts. I haven’t really paid for my membership in years. I wind up save more than the annual dues using these discounts! Take a look at NAPP and join today!
Lightroom 3 is finally here! It’s been a long ride full of adventure and discovery from Lightroom 3 Beta through Lightroom 3 Beta 2 to Lightroom 3. Along the way we all made suggestions and requests. Adobe listened. If one of your suggestions didn’t make it into this version don’t worry. This won’t be the last version of Lightroom. I am confident that we have a lot of new and exciting things in the future. For now, let’s get comfortable with Lightroom 3!
As with any version of Lightroom it all begins with Import. And this time around we have an entirely new and improved import feature. While this has been the source of some consternation and controversy, once you dig in and look at what’s new here I think you’ll be on board.
There was a time when film grain was a problem for some photographers. That concern translated into a concern with digital noise. Many words have been written on the techniques in many applications to remove or lessen digital noise or grain in modern images. Some even seek to find ways to remove the grain from old film photographs.
Despite all of this, grain has its place in modern digital photography. Grain now brings with it the charm and nostalgia of bygone film days. When compositing images, grain can be the unifying effect bringing different images from different times together for a great composite. Adding grain to a black and white or sepia image can add a pleasing artistic texture to the work. Whatever the reason, many photographers add grain to an image. Sometimes after working diligently to remove digital noise! But, then, grain isn’t noise.
We all know that Lightroom is not yet a net-workable application. While we can point our catalog to images on a network accessible drive we cannot put our catalog on a network drive. This presents a problem to those of who like to work on a laptop and a desktop.
There are techniques that we can use to work on two computers with a single catalog. Some include importing and exporting catalogs or parts of catalogs to keep everything in sync. All of that can lead to mistakenly overwriting good data with old. Or, perhaps, it gets too confusing to keep track. With a very large catalog this is our only recourse at present. However, for a smaller catalog here is a technique that leverages the cloud.
All you need is a Dropbox account! What? You don’t have one? Well before you read any further click here and get your FREE 2Gb account. Even if you don’t use it for this technique it is a very handy thing to have. The magic of dropbox is how it works so seamlessly. Each computer you install it on gets a local dropbox folder. Everything that happens in that folder is duplicated to your dropbox account in the cloud and then down to every other computer you’ve installed dropbox on. A recent addition allows dropbox to keep the folders in sync over your network for a quicker response.
Lightroom Product Manager, Tom Hogarty, in a recent post at Lightroom Journal revealed that Lightroom 3 will incorporate lens correction technology. According to Tom, lens correction will be available via manual correction and Lens Profiles. There will be a Lens Profile Creation Utility available at Adobe Labs to let photographers create their own Lens Profiles.
This is exciting news and brings a frequently requested capability to Lightroom! Check out Tom’s article and have a look at the video below for more information.
Last week Adobe released a maintenance upgrade to Lightroom. Lightroom 2.7 is available at Adobe’s download site or you can have Lightroom check for updates and download from there. Also released was an update to Camera Raw bringing it to version 5.7.
The update mainly supports new camera models including:
Canon EOS 550D (Digital Rebel T2i/ EOS Kiss X4 Digital)
Kodak Z981
Leaf Aptus-II 8
Leaf Aptus-II 10R
Mamiya DM40
Olympus E-PL1
Panasonic G2
Panasonic G10
Sony A450
The demosaic algorithm used to interpret raw data was updated bringing it more in line with the stellar improvements we’ve seen in Lightroom 3 Beta 2.
For more information take a look at Tom Hogarty’s article on Lightroom Journal.
The two biggest (and welcome) adjustments deal with how the Flickr Publish Service works. Previously, users who only had a free Flickr account had problems if a published image was deleted from the photostream in Lightroom or modified in any way, Lightroom couldn’t deal with the changing the image up on Flickr or removing the images from the Re-Publish or Deleted sections.
Adobe has released new betas for Lightroom 2.7 and Camera Raw 5.7. They are available at Adobe Labs. Click here for Lightroom 2.7. Click here for Camera Raw 5.7. This release supports new cameras: Canon EOS 550D (Digital Rebel T2i/ EOS Kiss X4 Digital), Kodak Z981, Leaf Aptus-II 8, Leaf Aptus-II 10R, Mamiya DM40, Olympus E-PL1, Panasonic G2, Panasonic G10, and Sony A450.
Adobe also had the following release notes for the betas:
Slideshow playback on Windows could cause Lightroom and/or the computer to crash. This has been corrected in Lightroom 2.7
In Lightroom 2.7 the camera raw cache limit was increased to 200GB (for an excellent discussion of what the camera raw cache is, see Seán McCormack’s article at Lightroom Blog!)
Please provide feedback on the Camera Raw plug-in on the User to User forums
Please provide feedback on the Lightroom release candidate here.
Email This Story
Print This Story
I had the pleasure of writing an article for Photoshop User magazine’s July/August 2010 issue. The topic is the new noise reduction technology in Lightroom 3. If you aren’t familiar with Photoshop User magazine, it is published by the N
Lightroom 3 is finally here! It’s been a long ride full of adventure and discovery from Lightroom 3 Beta through Lightroom 3 Beta 2 to Lightroom 3. Along the way we all made suggestions and requests. Adobe listened. If one of your suggestions didn’t make it into this version don’t worry. This won’t be the last version of Lightroom. I am confident that we have a lot of new and exciting things in the future. For now, let’s get comfortable with Lightroom 3!
There was a time when film grain was a problem for some photographers. That concern translated into a concern with digital noise. Many words have been written on the techniques in many applications to remove or lessen digital noise or grain in modern images. Some even seek to find ways to remove the grain from old film photographs.
We all know that Lightroom is not yet a net-workable application. While we can point our catalog to images on a network accessible drive we cannot put our catalog on a network drive. This presents a problem to those of who like to work on a laptop and a desktop.
Since Publish Services debuted in Lightroom 3 Beta 1, Adobe has adjusted some of the issues identified in the first beta. For a full description of what Publish services can do I refer you to my two previous articles 
