Shortly before midnight tonight, Adobe announced the release of Lightroom 3 Beta. I immediately downloaded it and started testing it out. The image seen in today's entry was post-processed entirely within Adobe Lightroom 3 Beta.

If you've paid attention to my photoblog for a while (or if you've ever checked out the about page), you might have stumbled upon this entry, in which I described my basic photography tools: Apple MacBook Pro, Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended, and Adobe Lightroom.

In that post, I wrote that “Adobe Lightroom may just be the best software (of any kind) that I've ever used,” and I think the case is true to this day. I've only played with the new software for a few hours, but I am already loving the new and improved vignette tool as well as the ability to add grain to photos. For the image in today's entry (can you guess where it was captured?), I used a B&W conversion within Lightroom, added a vignette, sprinkled some grain at size 44 and 25% amount, and finally added a graduated filter on the sky.

What I'm loving in Lightroom 3 Beta so far:
1. Improved import dialog box.
2. Ability to create watermarks (as well as to import one's own); this was a huge feature that was missing in previous versions of Lightroom.
3. The new vignette tool: lots of creative options here.
4. Ability to export images directly to Flickr.
5. Improved slideshow module. One can now export slides with music. Is anyone interested in seeing my images from France, Spain, Russia, Germany, or other places from around the world in a slideshow format?
The title of this post is significant. I am looking forward to working with Lightroom 3 Beta (testing out various features and reporting my thoughts of this software to the general public and/or developers of Lightroom). For example, one feature that I really want incorporated into the final version of Lightroom 3.0 is ability to correct distortion in images. Right now, I rely on using Photoshop to correct wide-angle distortion, but I think it would be really awesome if this feature was added to Lightroom. That said, when the final version of Lightroom 3.0 comes out in a few months, I will definitely incorporate it into my photography tool kit.

If you're a photographer, have you had a chance to download and install Adobe Lightroom 3 Beta? If so, what do you like most about it? Which features do you think Adobe needs to add to Lightroom 3? If you're not using Adobe Lightroom as part of your workflow, what do you use? I definitely think Adobe Lightroom is worth checking out if you're new to the scene.


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