Quickly: What’s New in Lightroom 3

You’ll find lots of improvements throughout the program. Here are some of the most important changes:

• Backup when quitting: It sounds like a little thing, but it embodies the kind of smart improvements you’ll find throughout the new version. Now, when you quit Lightroom 3, you’re asked if you want to back up the catalog. If you’ve been doing lots of work, it’s the most logical time to back up. Previously, you had to back up when you launched Lightroom.
• Tethered shooting: Greatly expanded from version 2, Lightroom 3 supports a tethered connection to most current Canon and Nikon DSLR cameras. Adobe is regularly expanding that list, enabling more photographers to control shots with Lightroom and have the results imported and displayed automatically.
• Imports: The import process has been redone from the ground up, thank goodness. It’s now much more intuitive, and it’s always clear what you’re importing from where. You can save frequently used settings as an import preset. You also can use Loupe view to inspect photos before moving them off the storage card.
• New process engine makes for greater noise reduction: A major under-the-hood reworking of Lightroom’s process engine means big improvements in noise control. Luminance and color noise reduction are now as good as, or better than, all the major third-party plug-ins. Low-light, high-ISO photos now look much better.
• Tone Curve: Lightroom’s new ability to switch to Point Curve enables you to shape the tone curve directly. Photoshop veterans will feel right at home.
• Lens correction: Still a work in progress, the Develop module’s lens correction feature offers the prospect of automatically correcting perspective and aberration based on the lens used. The list of supported lenses remains small, but it is growing. A downloadable manual option makes it possible for you to create a custom calibration for each of your lenses. Here is a video that makes it clear how useful this can be.
• Other develop improvements: The Develop module has been smoothed and buffed from top to bottom. Collections now appear right in the Develop module, eliminating the constant switching to the Library. The Adjustment Brush can now apply “negative sharpening,” which you can use to creatively blur parts of a photo.
• Videos: Increasingly, our cameras shoot stills and video. No, you can’t edit videos in Lightroom yet, but you now can import them into the catalog. That lets you rate them, apply keywords, and use all the organizational tools that make Lightroom so handy for stills. If you have ever accidentally deleted a video off a storage card because you forgot it was there, you will love this.
• Slideshows: Audio and video are becoming full citizens in Lightroom slideshows. You can take your stills and export them as a video. Soundtracks can be embedded into your slideshow, and it’s easy to sync the length to match the number of photos you use. I'll be posting some examples in the coming days.
• Watermarks: Lightroom 3 includes a simple watermark that you can quickly add to photos used in slideshows, Web galleries, or prints. Better yet, it includes a full-fledged Watermark Editor, similar to the Identity Plate Editor, for creating custom text- or graphic-based watermarks of your own.
• Printing: Creating custom photo packages has become as simple as grabbing and rearranging photos on a layout. There’s also a rotate-to-fit option to help you build paper-saving layouts. Maximum print resolution has been boosted to 720 pixels per inch from the previous limit of 480 ppi.
• Publish Services: Combining aspects of the collections feature with semi-automated exports, Publish Services enables you to track and update images exported from Lightroom. You can export directly to your Flickr account to share photos over the Web. Or export to folders that you use to sync photos with a mobile phone, a screensaver program, or even Web-based storage sites such as Dropbox.