Lightroom 3 beta

October 22, 2009

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/revie ... beta.shtml

If you're just looking for new bells and whistles this upgrade won't look very impressive from the descriptions of new features, but the most important aspect is that Adobe have rebuilt the develop module. If they've got it right this may lure many more pros away from Phase One Capture One as their RAW convertor (some still insist that it produces better results - I can't see any material difference to trade off against the convenience of LR).

Note that you can't import your existing Lightroom libraries (the Luminous Landscape article explains everything clearly).

I haven't downloaded the beta yet, but will do so soon.

For anyone who has been thinking of buying Lightroom, this is a way of using a free beta for a couple of months or more before deciding/committing.

mbird · October 22, 2009

Thanks Bruce. I'll be looking into that one!

Don;t you think it's a bit odd not being able to import the catalogues from LR2 though? Does this mean you have either got to export your entire catalogue along with the "sidecar" files, or simply have tow different versions of LR available?

I do like the addition of the "grain" effect though. I shot some more gig photos of my friends son's band earlier this week, for their school posters. I had to use a very high ISO (3200) because of the lighting, which added quite a nice grain effect in the monochrome images, like you see in music magazines, but in some instances it still wasn't enough for what I wanted (see below).

October 22, 2009

Very nice shot Mark!

It's only the beta that won't import existing Lightroom catalogues. When v. 3 is released, assuming it's like the migration from v.1 to v.2, there will be full import capability. I suspect that one reason they don't let you import your catalogues is in case the beta software trashes them, but if so, that seems excessively cautious.

Bruce