What Is Photoshop Lightroom 3?
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 is undoubtedly a wicked innovation of Lightroom 2. It took everything you weren’t fond of in Lightroom 2 and fixed it — I mean really fixed it. Lightroom 3 is a superb program that is faster and can be more easily accessed by the hands of photographers from amateurs to professionals. Two words to sum it up – better and faster – that’s the Lightroom 3, baby.
In organizing files, Lightroom 3 supports a wide variety of formats including most camera RAW files, JPEG, DNG, TIFF, and PSD. Importing files is easier and its organizational tools are extremely outstanding that help you to arrange your jumbled images into easy to locate collections. Improvements on the importing process in Lightroom 3 is really a key factor because it really makes filing and finding images a piece of cake. The simpler interface and clear visual keys help you to locate where your images are being stored plus the powerful search tools that make the process quicker.
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 enables you not to “edit” the images, but to digitally develop and enhance your photos. Precision in controlling is also offered especially on colors, light, shadows, tones, and even polishing your photos in seconds.
The speed has drastically increased with minimal or no lag between changing a setting from one to another. It offers a new noise reduction feature to control noise better than Lightroom 2. Sharpening is also more natural than it was. You can also have more significant adjustments to the pictures such as making cold and pale-looking pictures appear warm without any loss of quality.
Adobe also improved the slideshow module which now allows users to slideshows as video files. This is a great way of uploading images to Facebook in an interesting format. A built-in upload-to-Flickr is also showcased now which works like a treat! Exporting an image to an iPhone is easy too.
Lightroom 3 also offers tethered shooting support which allows Canon and Nikon cameras to be plugged into the computer and for the images to go straight to Lightroom without using a memory card. This is an advantage for fashion and commercial photographers to instantly review the images they are taking into a big screen. This will offer digital proofs to customers. Such a badass!
The only thing that might trip up new users is that Lightroom 3 doesn’t use the traditional “save” feature. It has now become the “export” function that took the place of the old save feature that everyone has grown accustomed to another program.
The Key Features Of Lightroom 3:
- – 64-bit compatibility
- – improvement import process
- – faster performance
- – lens correction
- – perspective correction
- – DSLR video support
- – Film Grain Simulation
- – Photoshop integration
- – image watermarking
- – easy synchronization of adjustments across multiple images
- – offline library management
These features made Lightroom 3 a much greater tool than Lightroom 2. For all photography junkies, this baby is really a must-have.
Other Products In The Adobe Photoshop Family
Currently, Adobe offers several Photoshop programs that all have the same theme (to allow the manipulation of computer images), but each of the programs has different features depending on your needs and they come with different price tags. The main program is Adobe Photoshop CS4 (Creative Suite 4), but there are also Photoshop CS4 Extended, Photoshop Elements 8 (which you can get bundled with Adobe Premiere Elements 8 and any of those have a Plus version), and Photoshop Lightroom 2.
Let’s start out by taking a look at the big gun. Adobe Photoshop CS4 allows you to edit pictures, create web pages, make pictures from scratch, manipulate photos, organize photos, and just about anything else related to image adjustment. Some of the new features include an Adjustments Panel which gives you all the tools needed to brighten, sharpen, and enhance color and tone, etc. all in one place. There is also the Mask Panel that allows you to put filters on top of your picture or just a portion of it to make images pop out from the background. The third new feature is Content-Aware Scaling. This is really cool. You can stretch a photo to create a longer background without stretching the object that you have focused on (like a person) this makes for excellent panoramic shots, without the panorama. Other improvements from the CS3 version include printing enhancements, the workflow between programs, customization of the panels, and more.
Photoshop CS4 Extended adds the ability to work with video and manipulate 3-D objects. The Photoshop CS4 version allows for more technical editing of the image than the other programs and is more for the advanced user. Photoshop CS4 costs $700 and the extended version is $1,000.
Photoshop Elements 8 is a great all-around program for the beginning and intermediate user. Great for amateur photographers, or those who just want to tinker with the family photos, you get all of the features necessary to create stunning masterpieces. Organize your pictures with visual tags and smart search options as well as “People Recognition.” Edit your photos for clarity, add funny captions, create slideshows, share with your friends, etc. With the addition of Premiere Elements 8, you can create movies that have audio. Most of the things in Elements 8 and Premiere Elements 8 are automated so you can let the program do the work for you with just a few clicks of the mouse. At $100, Photoshop Elements 8 is a good choice. Combined with Premiere Elements 8, the cost is $ 150 and for the average user, you can do practically anything you want to your images.
Finally, there’s Photoshop Lightroom 2. If you want a photo studio in your home, this is for you. At $300 you can do your own photo shoots and make them look good enough to put in any major magazine. Even if the lighting when you took the picture was crummy, you can make the shot look great. Of course, you can also manipulate images as you would in the other programs, but not necessarily to the same extent.
With these products, anyone can become a graphic designer. Whether you are just a hobbyist looking to make your pictures perfect with Adobe Photoshop Elements 8, or a professional photographer who needs to take blemishes off of their models with Adobe Lightroom 2, or even a movie editor that needs to turn several pictures into a moving animation with Photoshop CS4 Extended, you can’t do better than a Photoshop program. You can just get one or any combination of programs and know that they will all work together seamlessly so you can create the next blockbuster movie (or at least a blockbuster slide show for the family).
Author:
I am Armie Alen Experience for 5 years working with Arbico Computers Ltd as a digital consultant specializing in content marketing, writing, Product Awareness, and more.
