I got a chance to download and play with the latest beta of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 today. Let me start out by saying that I absolutely love Lightroom – I’ve been using it since v1.0 Beta (and even before that I was using Pixmantec RawShooter Pro before Adobe purchased them), and it’s essentially a one-stop-shopping program for the photographer. It’s not only an image processing tool, it’s also a searchable database. With it, I don’t use Photoshop all that often – most everything is done in Lightroom. But enough of that – on to the latest & greatest version, which can potentially eliminate another piece of software I use.
For the high ISO shots (say at ISO 800 and above), I typically run the images through NoiseNinja to clean up any of the sensor noise. Well, the latest beta of LR3 supposedly had an excellent noise reduction engine in the Develop module. So I decided to give it a try. Well, at first blush, the NR is incredible right out of the box! Here’s a screenshot of an ISO 800 shot I took yesterday. Click on it to view the full sized one (just a quick note, there are some JPEG artifacts from the compression on the image, so some of the higher contrast edges look a little funky – but you’ll still get the idea of the NR capabilities of LR3).
You can plainly see the difference in the Before and After panes – and that’s with just some quick adjustments to the sliders! Now I just have to sit down and figure out the best way to use it, but I’m pretty impressed with what there is so far – including the speed of the application overall. Much snappier than either the previous beta or version 2.
And for ha-has, here’s an ISO 1600 shot, that looks damned clean after tweaking things with the out of the box NR – and with this shot I even pushed the exposure about a half stop.
If the final version looks like this, I’ll be upgrading for sure!
OK, that was today’s geeky post. I promise I’ll keep ’em to a minimum…
Thanks!
Tom
