mau's blog

Lightroom 3 Beta

Yes, it’s been busy the last couple of weeks around here and although there is a lot of stuff I will post about soon, this news needed to be shared. Adobe has released Lightroom 3 Beta to the general public. This means that you can download a copy right now and start testing it and sending feedback directly to Adobe. Some of the new features that stand out for me from the brief overview I did are the following:

The import window is totally redone. It’s more “workflow-ish” than the previous version (yes I just created that word and I like it).  You get a column on the left for your source of images you would like to import, a center area where the images will preview and a right column that shows the possible destinations for your imported images.

At the top of the import window you get all the possible ways your images can be imported (copied, moved or converted to DNG). The new window also has a minimize mode where you just see the basic options and no previews which works great with another new feature which allows you to save presets of how you import images. More on that on a future post.

The slideshow module now allows you to save your slideshows as video files. A simple menu allows you to select the size of the video that you want and it takes 1 click to save. I’m glad to see an iPhone optimized option as a default since I’ve been planning on creating a video portfolio for my iPhone and this will make it super easy to update it with new content.

The last one that intrigued me just by looking at a couple of demo movies online is the concept of Publishing that has been introduced. I’m not clear on exactly how this works but it seems that you can publish (export?) collections of photos to a folder (or iPhone / device) and keep track of what has been sent to that destination. It sounds to me like a versioning system but will have to dig deeper to see what it does.

Now I’m off to explore some more options and also to send feedback to Adobe. And that specifically is worth mentioning. Adobe’s policy of opening their beta program to the public is something I feel is greatly appreciated by their customers. The feedback is really taken into account to perfect the final version of Lightroom. It’s something I don’t feel Apple does as well and that I believe Apple should learn from Adobe.

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