Lightroom 3 Review

I don't, as a rule, review my software but as the new lightroom is pretty cool, I thought I'd share my opinion on it.

Seems to me that the hype is well worth it, while at the same time, a little misleading. I upgraded from the beta version which Ii had been testing for about half a year, I loved the new and improved noise reduction algorithms which did exactly what they promised, I actually liked them so much I got rid of my 3rd party noiseware plugin for photoshop, which to be blunt, was time and resolution wasting. The colour noise reduction worked extremely well and even though the initial beta release didn't include the luminance noise reduction, I found that the colour NR was perfectly suitable for even the luminance noise...




In the Beta 2 release, the luminance NR slider was accessible and did a fantastic job of smoothing the noise without blurring the image like some programmes are wont to do.

I found that the Beta was very quick, even with my larger camera files and I was very impressed with the speed and efficiency of the overall program, so much so, in the two months leading up to the final official release, I was using the beta almost exclusively for my post production work.


I bought LR3 as soon as it was released and unfortunately, I ran into a host of problems with it.
Firstly, adobe has installed a lens correction option which is very cool for removing distortions in the image, but unfortunately when it is turned on and applied, the whole thing drops down in efficiency, my workaround that is not to apply it until all of my editing is completed and then turn it on for the final finish.

The cache is still set to 1GB which is blatantly not enough and first-time users will not realise that the cache needs to be increased to at least 10+ to improve performance.

Still, they managed to improve the NR feature some more, so it looks even more natural.

The sliders seem to be more responsive, but only after I had removed all of my 3rd party plugins (especially PTLens - which I was using previously to sort out lens distortion) although the Timothy Arms Mogrify and Blog plugins work well with the new version of Lightroom.

The crop dimensions are now more compact and easier to use, but unfortunately they still refuse to stick to a particular dimension when changing from one pic to another, I hope this will be resolved soon.


I will keep using it, and while there are still a few bugs in the system and it doesn't go as fast as promised, I am impressed and will use it for my post processing.

I would recommend that you have a go at the 30 day trial before purchasing, just to make sure you like it before shelling out to pay for the upgrade.