As a long-time user of Adobe Lightroom, I decided it was time to try the Lightroom 3 beta. Wow. I'm impressed. But be warned, you will probably start to see a lot more images with simulated film grain like this because Lightroom 3 has this new feature:
I get a kick out of this feature because most people that get way into digital photography pay lots of extra money to get a camera that doesn't produce "noisy" or grainy images. Now we have software that can add it back and make it look like you're using some of that old, ISO 1000 film.
But aside from all of that, the new version is refreshingly faster. Quite a lot faster. And, the vignette features are improved too--the old post-crop vignettes often made images look dirty or muddy around the edges. Now it is more subtle and you have a few choices as to how you want it applied: Giving preference to highlights or to color.
Slideshows can now be exported as videos. Nice! Some of you are probably thinking, "It didn't do that already?!" And that would be a good point on your part. Nevertheless, now we've got video slideshows which I will gladly take.
It also looks like they've improved the integration with online photo sites like flickr and, with a plug-in, Smugmug. I'm hoping all I have to do is select the photos and then click the Smugmug button. That would be cool.
But still, the biggest feature is how quickly you can get things done now with the performance improvements. The sliders slide so quickly that I nearly slid right off the screen. Good problem to have.
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