Everybody needs a little time off. Sorry about the lack of updates for the 15 people that actually read this; and to be honest I think I work with 14 of you. Anyway I’m back today after a busy month of freelance work and other life events keeping me busy. It just so happens on the day of my return that I get to review a new beta of Adobe Lightroom 3.

I’ve been a user of Lightroom since its beta back in 2006 and it has been an interesting relationship. My relationship with Adobe Lightroom beta’s is very similar to that of a relationship I had with a girl in middle school. We’d date for a week or two, it would be great we had a lot of fun - and fast forward a month later we couldn’t stand each other - now repeat this relationship about eight times and you have a nice healthy middle school relationship. The digital photography industry was very different in 2006 when Lightroom went into beta; 10mp cameras were thousands of dollars, there were format wars among all the leading camera companies, and we were all googling (not the search engine) over Photoshop CS2 and its kinda sorta acceptance of RAW. Now you can pick up a 10mp camera for $499 at Best Buy, you can shoot virtually every format of HD video, HDR is all the craze (or is it infra-red this year?), and social media makes or breaks our influence in the industry (and I continue to go unnoticed). Lightroom has come a long way since its initial beta release, but how far does it come from the Lightroom 2 full release? Let’s take a gander...

The difference between the releases of Lightroom 2 and Lightroom 3 beta are the “WHOA!” moment. Lightroom 2 had great new features; paint brush, dodge/burn, granulated filter, etc. Almost all the new features in Lightroom 2 had us going “WHOA!” because Adobe seemed to listen to feedback we were giving in blogs and forums. So I was expecting the same thing with the launch of the Lightroom 3 beta.

I was bummed. I think one very glaring realization hit me while using the Lightroom 3 Beta, but I’ll get to that later. Adobe released the following on their Lightroom page about the new features:

“ • Brand new performance architecture, building for the future of growing image libraries

• State-of-the-art noise reduction to help you perfect your high ISO shots
• Watermarking tool that helps you customize and protect your images with ease
• Portable sharable slideshows with audio—designed to give you more flexibility and impact on how you choose to share your images, you can now save and export your slideshows as videos and include audio
• Flexible customizable print package creation so your print package layouts are all your own
• Film grain simulation tool for enhancing your images to look as gritty as you want
• New import handling designed to make importing streamlined and easy
• More flexible online publishing options so you can post your images online to certain online photo sharing sites directly from inside Lightroom 3 beta (may require third-party plug-ins)*” (website)

So on the surface it looks pretty decent. But aside from noise reduction and watermarking this could have been a Lightroom 2.whatever release and I would have been fine with it. I will state that I’m sure Adobe will throw some more gems in the full release of LR3 so I am only commenting on what they gave us in the initial Beta.

To me, as an unknown professional, it seems that Adobe (like other pro level software companies out there) are catering to the soccer mom crowds with unlimited resources. The new import functionality is a good indication of this. Look, I’m all for quick and easy importing for my future-wifes photo’s or just very quick down/dirty no editing projects. I use Lightroom for precise importing and organizing, not for quick importing. To be perfectly honest iPhoto 09 is the best consumer level photo importing tool out there. Adobe clearly is attempting to make Lightroom a consumer level product and this is going to give us a slew of features that frustrate us, like “easy importing.” The old import module was quite easy, it distinguished itself from the UI of Lightroom and popped at you. The old import functionality was clear -

LIghtroom 2 import Lightroom 3 import

Okay, so being able to preview what your importing is sorta nice, but as someone who knows what their taking photo’s of, this isn’t a big deal. Soccer moms who have a 16Gb SD card with 3000jpg’s need this type of function to sift through their import because they are too afraid of deleting Danny’s photo’s of the Sunday morning Soccer match. As someone who archives much of his work, even the bad stuff sometimes, adding the glitz and glam of previewing before importing is just wasting time and interferring my workflow. Why have the pick/unpick/flag/unflagg function if you’re going to have me sift through everything in the beginning? The best part of my workflow is sitting back with a cup of Earl Grey and rejecting my work. When I import, I just want to import. Adobe also made the import way more confusing than it needs to be. The LR2 import immediately prompts my CF card reader. While LR3 does it also throws in all my backup drives to choose from and all my folders on my internal drive. Why? I want to import my cards, I’m not in the middle of working on a Library of photo’s and want to import from an older projects, I’m starting anew. So it’s a catch 22, the preview is for Soccer moms, but chances are the interface will be way to confusing for them to figure out how to import them. Like I mentioned, the old LR2 import was clean, easy and differentiated itself from the general UI to make it pop at you. The LR3 import is constrained within and is confusing even to a familiar LR user.

One other slightly irritating addition which makes sense but also doesn't is teh intergration of social uploading to flickr (with more to come I'd imagine). Straight from Cuppertino with this concept, iPhoto 09 to be exact. This feature is a great way for average consumers to get their out there. The thing is that Lightroom users, at least the old vangaurd of them, most likely have a way to distribute their work. For example I hate flickr because its ad supported. Great concept, but in the end I don't trust Flickr to not put an ad for hot Buffalo singles on my page when a potential client is looking at my work. Between the gallery functionality of Lightroom and other non-ad supported galleries out there. I'm not a huge fan or direct upload to social sites because the terms and conditions with these sites is always in question and to be perfectly honest, anyone who wants direct control over the way people are viewing their work understand that they need to come up with a solution to show that work. For me, flickr is not that solution but perhaps for Soccer moms it is.

There are some very good redeeming factors of the Lightroom 3 beta that make the whole thing worth the price of admission. Most notibly is the updated algirithm for processing noise reduction. Cameras are getting higher and higher ISO speeds and Lightroom 2 simply could not process noise reduction in a good way. Even my old Canon XTi on 1600ISO wouldn’t process noise reduction well. Now that cameras can take any picture in virtually any light, like the new Canon 1D with an ISO over 100,000, its great to have a tool that legitimately works. The introduction of color noise reduction helps with the overall noise reduction in a way that blew my mind..figuritively. Now we have multiple tools to work on noise reduction, whether it be luminance or color reduction.

To counter balance noise reduction, however, Adobe gives us a really great film grain effect that was apparently in demand. So the folklore goes, many photographers were irritated that they had to send their images into photoshop to add ‘film noise’ so they got together one day, created a few hundred blog posts to complain about it and Adobe obliged and gave it to them in Lightroom 3 Beta. To be honest its a cool little feature but i’d love for someone to explain to me why we would spend so much time reducing noise of an image only to add ‘film grain’ to it? Someone, anyone? feel free to contact me. But I will say it goes in the plus category because it is a very nice effect that will surely be overused. Just a note, anything over 14% film grain is too much, feel free to argue about it but anyone with a traditional photo background will realize the “film look” gets old real quick. So hover around 14%

Perhaps the biggest addition to Lightroom 3 is the built in watermarking ability. In the past, plug-ins have allowed us to do this but its always nice when a developer of one of the largest software companies in the world chooses to listen to the overwhelming demand of its users and put in a feature we want natively. In the past I was frustated with the watermarking plug-ins so I would have to create an automation to send my work to photoshop to add a very simple text mark.

For me, Lightroom 3 will be worth buying. But it will be loaded with features that I will hardly use. I was definetely looking for a little bit more of a UI update, but the core functionality of the application was great. I can forsee Lightroom now ending up like Photoshop where it will be loaded features to please everybody. What I think Adobe needs to realize is that they need ot focus on the core of the program. Lightroom is bringing photographers the ability to effectively develop their photography as is they were in the dark room. Bells and whistles are nice, but keep them in Photoshop. Lightroom 2 was nearly perfect, now Adobe can either embrace it or ignore it and let it become the new photoshop.