Yes! Yippie!

My favourite photo processing software – before jumping over to Adobe CS4 in my workflow just got an update. Okay, not the real ‘full update’ yet, but anyway :  the New Adobe Lightroom 3.0 Public Beta is out.

Perfectly timed for the longer days in autumn and winter 2009, Adobe today released the new Adobe Lightroom 3.0 Public Beta Software. It can be downloaded and tested by everyone. Here is the download link at Adobe Labs: Adobe Lightroom 3.0 Beta. I installed the Mac Version (71,4 MB ZIP Dowload) without any problem next to LR2 without any problem. So you can stick with your main working environment while testing the new beta version.

Some of the new features of Lightroom 3.0 Beta:

• Brand new performance architecture, building for the future of growing image libraries
• State-of-the-art noise reduction to help you perfect your high ISO shots
• Watermarking tool that helps you customize and protect your images with ease
• Portable sharable slideshows with audio—designed to give you more flexibility and impact on how you choose to share your images, you can now save and export your slideshows as videos and include audio
• Flexible customizable print package creation so your print package layouts are all your own
• Film grain simulation tool for enhancing your images to look as gritty as you want
• New import handling designed to make importing streamlined and easy
• More flexible online publishing options so you can post your images online to certain online photo sharing sites directly from inside Lightroom 3 beta

An Overview in form of several videos about the new features can be found at: Adobe TV and at NPP at their Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 Beta Learning Center. There are plenty more ressources to read and view about the new Lightroom 3.0 Beta.

Worth a click and viewing are: Julieanne Kost on AdobeTV and of course Scott Kelbys Photoshop Insider Blog

This Public Beta Software is of course not final, neither in technical stability nor in the feature set. It will work until April 2010, so we have at least a rough ETA of when Adobe Lightroom 3.0 will finally be released. You can discuss potential bugs, new features etc. on the Adobe Lightoom 3.0 Forum with other Beta Users. Looking back to the evolvement of Adobe Lightroom 2.0 it`s likely that there might be a Lightroom 3.0 Beta 2 or an Release Candidate available to the public in the near future, too. So it make make sense to wait a while to read in the forums if there are major problems.

After installing and processing the first images, I didn`t had any major problems. But this is just after a quick testing, so if I´m running into problems I will post them asap. The new import functionality, the new watermark feature, the easy FlichR Export & Upload integration are phantastic. Also the Speed of this Beta Version is already very,very  good. Regarding the Quality of the new Noise Reduction, Vignetting Options and Fim Grain adding I need more time to play around as of today. So if you have time play with this new software. I`m sure afterwards we all can`t wait for the final realease of Adobe Lightroom 3.0. Another great feature is that even with the new fetures your old settings in your file modification still remain in place as adobe introduced ‘Versions’ into LR 3.0. So you can still use your old modifications and you can compare those with the new technology simply by changing the from version 1 to version 2… that’s really awesome and a big step forward compared to the development of the previous versions.

With ACR 6.0 in Beta, I guess that Adobe Photoshop CS5 can`t be miles away. Finally we can expect that Mac Users will be able to use more than 4 GB RAM and 64 Bit SL Support also within Photoshop in the near future…