Adobe’s released a beta of its upcoming Lightroom 3 been downloading it and have watched the videos (about 45 minutes worth). The beta seems pretty focused on getting feedback on specific new things, most of which are enhancements or re-implementations of existing features, rather than new features. I hope that means that there are still new features in the works, because soft-proofing isn’t mentioned anywhere and I think I’m going cry if LR3 doesn’t have it.
Highlights from what I’ve seen:
- Completely rebuilt rendering engine.
- Redone sharpening and noise reduction. I hope these are really improved, because they were a bit weak in LR2, IMO.
- Publish services allow for managing multiple export types, like to Flickr or to a local folder for iTunes. LR will sync changes made in those sources back to the LR catalog, and also make it easy to re-publish to those sources when changes are made in LR.
It’s just finished downloading, so I’m off to play a bit. I’ll post more later. I’m about half-way through editing my pics from last weekend’s mountain biking trip to Downieville, so I’ll import that project into LR3 and give it a whirl.