Lightroom 3.0 Beta Now Available!

[NikosR]

I've noticed that I'm getting XMPs all over the place even though the option is not checked in Catalog Settings - Metadata.  Is this a bug or am I doing something wrong?

[madmanchan]

It doesn't maintain two sets, one for each process version, right?

No, it does not. The expectation is that users who wish to tweak their sharpening settings will want to move over to the new process version, as opposed to flipping back and forth between the two available process versions.

[madmanchan]

I am a little confused here. What if I want to have a different radius, amount, detail whatever for local (creative) sharpening, how can I use the global sliders for these local parameters without changing the global sharpening?

You cannot. There is only 1 set of settings, which is used for both global and local.

[madmanchan]

Can we assume that we won't be getting these new features until ACR 5?

Hi Ben, when LR 3 ships, there will be some version of CR that provides rendering parity with LR 3 (just like when LR 2 shipped). However, the number of that version is not yet known.

Eric

[ajtaylor]

Well Bibble seem to think it's worthwhile, they support Linux, others include Lightzone, Picasa, Raw Therapee.
That kinda says something. Maybe you need to check Linux out, it's come on a lot in the last few years, truth is, I would gladly get shot of windows if more applications were on Linux.

I'm a big Linux fan (and Solaris too). But... I don't consider it ready for proper photo editing yet. Not until we have proper colour profile support, and a colorimeter that works under Linux. Yeah, you can kludge things like calibrate under Windows and then use the profile under Linux, but given that the driver is different, you can't guarantee accuracy.

I use Picasa under Linux for my school (I'm a teacher and school photographer) photography, partly because I just haven't got the storage space on my Mac to keep the 25000 pics a year I took for school, and because I just need my photos to be acceptable rather than accurate for that particular purpose. For my own photography (strictly amateur, landscapes), I want it to be as accurate as I can. I use my Mac.

Google have, I believe, stopped Picasa "development" on Linux again (it was always running under Wine as it was, so it was mostly packaging rather than development), and won't be releasing 3.5 due to lack of interest.

I really can't see a company like Adobe splurging lots of money on making a version for Linux. Particularly as the mindset of many (most? or at least the most vocal) Linux zealots is that if it runs on Linux, it must be free, and if it's not free, it ain't worth running, and anyone who wants to charge for software must be evil.

I would expect that most professional photographers choose their camera system, their software, their OS in that order. Therefore, whilst LR and Photoshop continue to be Mac or Windows, most professional photographers will stick with Win/Mac.

[joedecker]

Really love the improvements in noise reduction from the samples I've seen so far.  Boffo, a good one.

http://www.photocrati.com/a-first-glance-a...age-processing/

--Joe

[Tam]

Noise reduction, sharpening, thumbs up.
Performance much better with local adjustments.

Except for the library I'm still hanging around in PsCs4. Looking forward to integration.

Thanks for the beta  - looking forward to the next iteration.

[smahn]

You cannot. There is only 1 set of settings, which is used for both global and local.

That's a shame. Why does sharpening get short shrift? Local exposure, contrast, saturation, etc, adjustments aren't constrained to the global setting - so why is sharpening?

[madmanchan]

smahn, sharpening is not getting shortchanged. You do get to vary the sharpening on a local basis: specifically, you get to change the amount. This is exactly the same as the exposure, contrast, saturation, etc. With all of those controls, global and local, you get to change the amount: more exposure, less exposure, more contrast, less contrast, etc. With local sharpening, you get to do the same: more sharpening here, less sharpening there.

Perhaps what you are referring to is the fact that sharpening has 3 extra sliders (Radius, Detail, Masking), which the other controls you mentioned do not have. It is true that capture sharpening and local sharpening are now sharing the parameters for those 3, instead of being able to set them separately. This is by design. It sounds limiting on paper, but have you actually tried it? If not, I encourage you to do so. There's no other way you'll be able to tell whether or not it works.

[smahn]

smahn, sharpening is not getting shortchanged. You do get to vary the sharpening on a local basis: specifically, you get to change the amount. This is exactly the same as the exposure, contrast, saturation, etc. With all of those controls, global and local, you get to change the amount: more exposure, less exposure, more contrast, less contrast, etc. With local sharpening, you get to do the same: more sharpening here, less sharpening there.

Perhaps what you are referring to is the fact that sharpening has 3 extra sliders (Radius, Detail, Masking), which the other controls you mentioned do not have. It is true that capture sharpening and local sharpening are now sharing the parameters for those 3, instead of being able to set them separately. This is by design. It sounds limiting on paper, but have you actually tried it? If not, I encourage you to do so. There's no other way you'll be able to tell whether or not it works.

Eric, my analogy was off, but the point remains that localized sharpening is being dumbed down to be Amount only, like those other controls, when the functionality is in place to offer greater local control.

I'm not a coder, maybe there are obvious limitations I don't understand. I'm just a user with a love/hate relationship with LR. For instance, elsewhere on this board can be found my thread (without response) lamenting the fact that LR renders my layered PS Tiff files differently than Photoshop, both in preview and export. Cataloging files, making parametric edits, making local adjustments, and outputting to Jpeg or PDF, typically requires the use of at least three programs (LR, PS, Bridge) because no two preview or output my files the same. In fact, when making jpegs from my layered tiffs, I typically do so through both Bridge and LR so as to be able to choose the better of the two. This is a real multiplication of effort.

I realize my work (jewelry photography) might have different needs and rigors than other disciplines, especially with regard to sharpening. But any changes to the product lineup that would diminish my need to jump back and forth among 3 or more programs per shot would be welcome. Specifically, I'd love the ability to make precisely masked edits and variable sharpening adjustments parametrically, which would hopefully translate to an ability to export/output files that more closely resemble the Master Files. But it appears my desires will not be fulfilled in this coming generation of product, so I'm sad. If so much of my work still needs to be done with PS and Bridge it really limits the usefulness of LR at all, as I gain greater cataloging functionality with a product like iView/Expression.

In short, yes I've been playing with it. I see potential for some shots, but I also know from experience that much of my work requires different sharpening parameters in different locations, and while LR seems to have the functionality at hand to fulfill this need it wont be implemented, and I think it's a missed opportunity and a pity.

[Hans Knikman]

Thanks for the answer Eric. In that case I don't understand the remarks Jeff Schewe made in this respect. And in that case I also think more controls in the detail section would be nice. Other options?

[TheSuede]

Is the effect that noise/sharpening has on the scaled down preview going to decrease when the luma NR module is activated? I'm getting some strange effects when viewing pictures (in scaled down preview) that I've had to use more than normal amounts of sharpening on. The effect is like oversharpening/undersampling of the picture, and all contrast edges are brightened and noise overattenuated. Is the preview sharpening applied with "normal strength" - but on the scaled down picture? In that case, maybe the "saling" of the sharpening shoul be toned down quite a bit...

Otherwise I'm loving the results of the beta. My only gripe ever with LR/ACR was that they could give a "blotchy" appearance, and that they painted fine detail with "a little wider brush" than some of the best of the competition. Twigs against a sky, and fine detail in hair or detail on a rock formation always got a slight widening of dark-contrast detail, as if the algorithm smoothed the detail too much and then sharpened it back to shape. Not so anymore... :-)

I really think that the "sharpened preview at <100% magnification" was unnecessary though... If you want to do output sharpening on a scaled down picture, that should be done in the output section. The preview can't really show you what your resulting output is going to look like anyway - since it not exactly the same scale.

[NikosR]

Thanks for the answer Eric. In that case I don't understand the remarks Jeff Schewe made in this respect. And in that case I also think more controls in the detail section would be nice. Other options?

I guess he was meaning to say that being able to selectively increase sharpening would allow one to use less global sharpening and vice versa. I don't think he was implying there's a way to alter parameters like radius etc selectively.

[madmanchan]

Correct, you cannot alter radius, detail, and masking parameters selectively. I understand it sounds limiting -- at least on paper. Our internal testing on real images suggests otherwise. Of course, this is the purpose of the public beta: so that you, the users, can decide for yourselves and give the team feedback. If it turns out there's a healthy number of images that users can provide to demonstrate that this design point is a significant limitation, then the team will reconsider. (Yes, there are significant penalties to enabling selective application of the other three sliders.)

[madmanchan]

In short, yes I've been playing with it. I see potential for some shots, but I also know from experience that much of my work requires different sharpening parameters in different locations, and while LR seems to have the functionality at hand to fulfill this need it wont be implemented, and I think it's a missed opportunity and a pity.

If you can provide example images where the LR 3 beta implementation is insufficient, that would be very helpful and appreciated.

[madmanchan]

Is the effect that noise/sharpening has on the scaled down preview going to decrease when the luma NR module is activated? I'm getting some strange effects when viewing pictures (in scaled down preview) that I've had to use more than normal amounts of sharpening on. The effect is like oversharpening/undersampling of the picture, and all contrast edges are brightened and noise overattenuated.

Sharpening is applied at a correspondingly reduced strength when viewed at < 100% pixel view, not full strength. It is possible (even likely) that it is not correctly tuned at this point, i.e., it is too strong, particularly when using high amounts of capture sharpening.

Noise will be attenuated simply because you are downsampling the image. No luminance NR is being applied currently.

The idea of sharpening and color NR being applied at smaller previews is only to give you a rough idea of how it'll look when downsampled and output sharpened. It is more accurate than before, when sharpening and color NR were completely omitted, but not as accurate as the 1:1 preview. This is why it is still recommended that you zoom the preview size to 100% or larger when adjusting the controls in the Detail panel, which is what the tooltip for the warning icon should say when you place the mouse over it.

[TheSuede]

Thank you very much for your prompt answer.
I guess I worded that a bit off from my intention - what I meant to say was that noise was very much MORE present (stronger) in the scaled down preview ("fit to width"), than in the finished export output (opening the exported picture in PS, and comparing them by toggling the LR and PS windows). I'm downsampling directly in the export action, to pixel dimensions that roughly corresponds to my preview-pane width (~1700 pixels). But I guess that this stems from the scaling of sharpening strength/radius not being tuned "right" yet, just as you said.

Aside from this, I'm a happy camper in Beta-land. :-)

Your prescensce in the Beta-support (and here!) is much appreciated, and I do hope you gain a lot of more confident customers by this effort.

[smahn]

If you can provide example images where the LR 3 beta implementation is insufficient, that would be very helpful and appreciated.

That's fair. I'll see what I can come up with. But harkening back to Bruce Frazier, should we expect the parameters of sharpening a low frequency item like a pumpkin vs  a high frequency item like twigs against the sky to vary only by "amount"? How to optimize when both are present in the same shot?

Eric, I don't want to cause thread drift but my other thread got no answers, and maybe the issue is tamgentially beta 3 related. Why does LR render layered PS files (in my case TIFFs) slightly differently than PS? The difference shows up in preview and export. They obviously handle the files differently in that LR doesn't actually open the original to export it, and is therefore much faster, but is it that they read layer order differently? Is there anything I can do to mitigate the difference?

FWIW, I'm not a longtime LR user so I can't tell you all the types of images where this difference might come into play, but I have been using it extensively on my current job of 27 jewelry shots, and the differences mainly show up in LR rendering the middle and lower tones of sharpened diamonds lighter and less robust than PS.

[kers]

I am using a Nikon D3x camera with NX2-

I just tried LR3 on a high and low iso photo


100 asa:  With Lightroom2 the fine detail was bad- Now in 3 it has much improved and is on level with Nx2
However the NX2 rendering is softer and provides a lot more detail in the dark areas-

On High Iso 6400- I cannot find any reason to use LR3 - NX2 is beter here too

The only reason to not Use NX2 is that the interface is among the worst you can find...

But still I use it.

[Christopher]

I am using a Nikon D3x camera with NX2-

I just tried LR3 on a high and low iso photo


100 asa:  With Lightroom2 the fine detail was bad- Now in 3 it has much improved and is on level with Nx2
However the NX2 rendering is softer and provides a lot more detail in the dark areas-

On High Iso 6400- I cannot find any reason to use LR3 - NX2 is beter here too

The only reason to not Use NX2 is that the interface is among the worst you can find...

But still I use it.

well without samples your statement isn't really useful at all.