Adobe has released a public beta of Lightroom 3, the company’s tool for processing and organizing cameras’ RAW images. While still an early release, Lightroom 3 looks to be a worthy upgrade thanks to impressive speed improvements and baked-in image sharing tools.
For Lightroom 3, Adobe completely rewrote much of the underlying code. The result still looks like Lightroom, but it’s considerably faster than previous releases.
Large image libraries in Lightroom 2 frequently meant blurry, pixelated previews that took a few seconds to resolve into sharp thumbnails. At times Lightroom could feel like a web-based editor for how much trouble it had rendering thumbnails.
Thankfully, pixelated previews are a thing of the past with Lightroom 3. We loaded up an 8,000+ image library into the new beta and not only were the thumbnail previews sharp no matter how many images we scrolled through, common tasks like switching from Library view to Develop view and exporting images to Photoshop were noticeably faster.
Speed isn’t the only thing new in this beta. Lightroom 3 will also bring integrated support for publishing your photos to the web. In the beta, that means built-in syncing with Flickr.
To use the Flickr syncing tool simply authorize Lightroom to access your Flickr account. Once that’s done, publishing your images is a drag-and-drop task. Even better, the syncing is two-way: Lightroom 3 will pull down and update your metadata with any changes made on Flickr and will also grab any comments on the image.
Lightroom 3 now imports comments on your photos from Flickr.
For those with Flickr Pro accounts, it’s even possible to edit and update images that you’ve already posted on Flickr.
The new publish tool also allows you to export images to folders on your desktop or an external drive. It’s a nice backup feature, but it also means that you can now use Lightroom to manage your iPhone photos — just publish your Lightroom images to a folder and tell iTunes to sync photos from that folder.
While on the surface most of Lightroom 3 looks just like Lightroom 2, the import dialog has been radically revamped. Not only is the import tool much faster, it now offers full-resolution image previews and the ability to define import templates.
Lightroom 3's import dialog is faster.
The other standout feature in the Lightroom 3 beta is the new set of sharpening and noise reduction tools, which makes it a snap to get rid of noise in high ISO images.
The new algorithm managed to get rid of a significant amount of color noise without overly softening the images we tested it with. Although the results weren’t perfect, Lightroom 3 did a much better job than its predecessor. The noise reduction tools will be particularly useful for those who’ve upgraded to some of the new, extremely high ISO cameras from Nikon and Canon.
Addicted to high ISO levels? Lightroom 3 can help reduce the noise.
On the flip side of the noise spectrum, Lightroom 3 sports a new “film grain” tool that allows you to simulate the look high-ISO film grain without using an external editor. So if graininess is your thing, you can put it back in as easily as you can take it out.
So far Adobe has not set a release date for the final version of Lightroom 3. If you’d like to test Lightroom 3 you can grab a copy from the Adobe Labs website. Be careful though, this is a true beta with known bugs. We definitely don’t recommend using it for production work and highly recommend making a backup copy of any images you plan to import.
What goes better with a brand new Freescale smartbook reference design than a little Flash? An actual price and a release date, maybe, but Flash isn’t too shabby either. That, naturally, comes courtesy of a little help from Adobe, who worked with Freescale and Movial to get Flash 10.1 up and running on Freescale’s i.MX51 family of processors — which, incidentally, power a range of other mobile devices in addition to smartbooks you can’t buy. Still nothing in the way of demos or anything, unfortunately, but Freescale says that the first devices ready to support Flash 10.1 will indeed be smartbooks.
