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Finally some news on the Lightroom front! Lets be honest and admit that LR has been fairly underwhelming up until now and that the updates to the 2.x series during the last year or so has left at least me wondering whether Adobe was dropping the project. But at long last, Adobe has released LR3 and added substantial improvements both in terms of features and speed.
- Lightroom Queen: What’s new.
- Cameradojo: Learning center.
The new drag and drop publish services stand out of course. As do the improvements to noise and sharpening algorithms. I was also pleased to see lens corrections as a brand new feature. For those of use that suffer from cheaper / dodgier lenses this is a very welcome addition. In fact, most lenses could probably use some post-processing. Unfortunately, only two of my four lenses were available among the lens profiles. Both the Tamron 17-50mm and Canon 100mm Macro were nowhere to be found. No big deal for the would-be L-class prime perhaps but the Tamron is an entirely different matter, at least at 17mm. Overall there were virtually no Tamron lenses in the database. On the other hand, Sigma was extremely well stocked and much to my surprise I found the Sigma 150-500 OS. As well as the Canon 70-200 L obviously. Now the question is if people and lens manufacturers will comply in making lens data available. And where to collect and download this data? I cannot find a site for 3rd party profiles anywhere.
With these new improvements there is virtually now reason to look for complementary tools like Noise Ninja or DXO Optics anymore. Almost everything can be accomplished from within LR.
Now all we need is for Jeffrey Friedl to update his plugins for LR3. Particularly the PicasaWeb export. I do run his Folder Watch plugin as well, but it has become increasingly unmanageable as it has to move through thousands of images every run. Still wondering how to automatically get images from the camera into LR fast and hassle free. And still preserve a folder structure (like year_month_day). Or perhaps you can only have a few hundred photos in the database at a time.
