Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3
- Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 software helps you bring out the best in your photography, whether you’re perfecting one image, searching for ten, processing hundreds, or organizing thousands.
- Get the absolute best from every image you shoot with world-class editing power and intuitive controls that set your creativity free.
- Breeze through your digital photography tasks quickly and efficiently, so you can spend more time shooting–your core photography essentials are included in one fast, intuitive application.
- Experiment fearlessly with state-of-the-art nondestructive editing tools, including world-class noise reduction.
- Share your vision with elegant options for showcasing your images in customized print packages, dynamic slide show videos with music, web galleries, and on popular photo-sharing sites.
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 software helps you bring out the best in your photographs, whether you’re perfecting one image, searching for ten, processing hundreds, or organizing thousands.
Create incredible images that move your audience. Experiment fearlessly with state-of-the-art nondestructive editing tools. Easily manage all your images. And showcase your work in elegant print layouts, slide shows, and web galleries, as well as on popular photo-sharing sites. All from within
Rating: 
(out of 17 reviews)
List Price: $ 299.00
Price: $ 229.00
September 16th, 2010 on 4:07 am
Review by Dean C. Broome Jr. MD for Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3
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Those familiar with Photoshop might wonder why an additional product should be needed to manage digital images. I would offer this difference: Photoshop is a program for image manipulation. Lightroom is a program that expedites photography workflow. [By using the term "workflow," I don't mean to imply that it's geared only to those who are in the profession of photography; amateurs and hobbyists alike (like I am), who also wish to prepare quickly and print images, can benefit from this highly-practical and time-efficient program.]
Lightroom 3 simplifies enormously the process of preparing photo captures for use, whether as web or print applications. It facilitates quick organization & preview, raw enhancement, printing, and web uploading of photos.
The “library” module permits quick organization of picture groups. The amazing, work-saving catalog system allows rapid naming, labeling & flagging, copying, metadata editing & review, and filtering of files, then presents a robust preview for easy access to the rest of the photographic workflow. A stellar feature of the file handling is the (relatively) low memory burden placed on computer RAM — most all of these activities originate from small files that make good use of the .dng formatting.
The “develop” module contains all of the necessary controls to adjust exposure, correct lens aberrations, establish a good white point to remove color casts, manipulate color and grayscale attributes, crop, retouch discreet areas of a photo, and, generally, to perform all the actions of an after-the-fact camera, insofar as these are possible, to improve the raw (proprietary or .dng) images that come from a digital source. One very fine feature is the ability to create instantly a “virtual copy” of your photo, which you can edit, change, enhance, etc. — all without altering your original file.
The “slideshow” module lets you combine photos into a presentation for automatically viewing a sequence of photos as slides. Text can be added, as well as an intro slide and a conclusion slide. You can even add a music file to the background of your presentation, and the program will automatically time your slideshow to the length of your music clip. Slideshows can then be downloaded into a variety of different video formats (including mp4, which I use most frequently).
Finally, the “print” or “web” modules expedite the last-step output to the desired final product. There’s a marvelous preview of your photo presented prior to the actual printing. There’s even a feature to upload your photos automatically to a Flickr account and (in the updated version) to Facebook.
Though a learning curve is associated with attaining mastery of Lightroom, the controls are very intuitive. I’m a virtual neophyte who has had the product for only about 48 hours now, and have been able to output some very satisfying images to my printer.
I’ve been an Adobe fan since the dark ages of computer imagery in the 1980′s [my Pagemaker license number was issued by Aldus], and this product once again confirms for me their hegemony in the realm of computer graphics.
Conclusion: Lightroom 3 is a highly recommended program for those who like to snap and publish digital photos.
September 16th, 2010 on 4:30 am
Review by Well of Mimir for Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3
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Lightroom 3 was an awesome addition to my studio. Prior to using lightroom I was using Bridge and PhotoShop to process all my photos. If you go out and shoot a few photos a week I would not recommend dropping the cash to get lightroom. If you shoot or want to shoot 1000+ images a day and don’t want to spend most of your time in front of a computer doing post work, buy lightroom 3.
Performance: Lightroom 3 works amazingly well on computer running a 64bit OS like win7. After watching a few tutorial videos on the program I was able to add lightroom to my work-flow and get files edited and to my clients about twice as fast as just using BR/PS.
Great for:
1.Noise reduction (simple and awesome)
2.Making small to medium adjustments to photos quickly
3.Managing photo meta data
4.cataloging and sorting
5.getting images to the web
6.printing packages
7.slide shows
8….
September 16th, 2010 on 5:29 am
Review by Michael R. Holgate for Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3
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This program without a doubt is the finest aid to addressing minor issues to a digital image on the market! The design and workflow is second to none. Makes adjustment to images easy and effortless.I highly recomend Lightroom 3 to people serious about Photography. The old rule applies as with any editing program, and that is, you need to start with a decent image to begin with, and Lightroom 3 makes those minor adjustments a breeze!
It gets all the stars applicable in the rating, and comes “highly” recomended by myself!
MRH
September 16th, 2010 on 6:11 am
Review by Hank for Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3
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I’ll start off by saying I thought $300 for a photo program was more than I wanted to spend. I had tried the 30 day trial when LR2 came out, but couldn’t get in enough keyboard time during the 30 day trial period. I decided to try the Beta when LR3 B1 came out and actually got about 70 days under my belt before B2 expired.
I had bought and used Elements 3 and 7, and while pretty good enhancers, there organizational abilities were weak. By weak, I mean, once they were catalogued and or key worded, they were fine, but the key wording was tedious.
Enter LR3. It doesn’t have the capability of Elements (or photoshop either, I assume) but it does have enough capability to handle 90+% of what I do. What I usually do is correct color and exposure, saturate or desatureate some colors to enhance the image or de-emphasize the back ground, sharpen things up a bit and or decrease noise, mostly luminous, and apply the lens correction feature. I have also used the curves feature and the section I think they call shade, saturation and Lumination to make local adjustment to brightness and color. All in all, I can make almost all reasonably exposed photos, (+-2.5 stops) look pretty good. The program doesnot have the capability to distort shape, color or texture for artistic purposes, which I do not do at this time. The program does have a perspective correction section which I have had reasonable success with on the small number of uses I have had with it.
I have dabbled in the other features, such as healingand red eye reduction (easy and effecetive), paint brushing, tinting etc. My experience here is limited, but the features seem to be effective.
Its real standout is organization. I had about 11,000 photos in my file which I reduced to about 8000 by using the easy to use “compare mode”. I also keyworded these images in about 2 weeks of daily effort averaging 2 to 4 hours per day. ( a concentrated effort for sure). The keywords are easy to set up and the program’s auto-type and table of recent keywords is very helpful and a great time saver.
In general, I say if your main goal is organization of your file, perhaps coupled with a desire for slide show, this program has a lot of features to consider, (I did not use the print or post to facebook sections at all). If you’re into MAJOR image correction or enhancement, for artistic purposes, this program will fall short. I hope this helps.
September 16th, 2010 on 6:12 am
Review by Christian for Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3
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For the most part this program is a gift from the Adobe Gods. It’s fast and has cut my post production time down to a small fraction of what it used to be. So for the most part I believe that every photographer should be in this program. Just being able to FINALLY automate the insertion of jpeg or PNG logos has made many things so much easier!
Two faults that I just can’t get my head around:
1) This program has so many controls that are identical to PS4-5, why didn’t they also include the color controls that are in PS4-5 for RAWs???
2) I rename/number my files to be more personable in relation to my clients. The renaming/numbering system in LR3 is more like a rookie mistake than a contemporary system in that if you use numerics at the end of your new file names, and then go to burn them to CD/DVD, the numbering system causes the files to drop out of their true order. So rather than 001, 002, 003, etc., you’ll get 1, 11, 12 … 2, 20, 21 … 3, 30, 31, etc.
So I’m still toggling between programs to rename/number my files, but aside from that I love this program.