There have, of course, been a great number of posts here recently regarding the new Lightroom 3.0, and now (already) Lightroom 3.2. A great deal of this comment, including my own, has been somewhat critical or dealing with bugs and perceived issues with the new release. So I though that it was perhaps time for some praise for Lightroom instead – specifically the new features in LR3 which we really like and were happy to pay the upgrade money for, to have on our photo-editing PCs. The following are my personal favourites – please feel free to add your own, because I am sure there are a host of other improvements which are easy to overlook.
• You can now optimise the catalog from the file menu at any time without LR having to reboot. A small thing, but so much less clunky.
• The perspective control is really excellent if like me you shoot a lot of townscapes and architectural stuff. I know that it is essentially the same as the PC in Photoshop anyhow, but it is really so convenient having it within LR. I just wish that I didn’t get a huge performance hit when I make use of it.
• Something which I have hardly seen mentioned, but which I absolutely love and am already addicted to, is the new vignette tool. Perhaps if you work in colour this is not a feature which you might make much use of, but for us B/W workers it is the bee’s knees. The vignette is now adjustable so that the highlight areas can be less affected (or not at all), meaning that you can selectively darken just the mid-tones. Instant Bill Brandt!
• The detail sliders which have been added to the colour and luminance NR controls are very useful when dealing with a high ISO image. It means that the NR can be really fine-tuned in a trade-off between smoothness and detail. With my Hasselblad photos I find that I can often really make use of this.
• As Eric explained in another thread, the sharpening in LR3 now uses a deconvolution algorithm if you set the detail slider to 100. You then need to use a radius of 0.5 to say 0.8, and a tasteful setting for amount (I find somewhere around 20 – 35 to be suitable). For landscape and architectural photos with masses of fine detail this produces a good result with absolutely no halos.
Over to you. For once I came not to bury Lightroom, but to praise him.
John
