Lightroom 3 Beta 2 - What's New

[drg]

The Photography Review Feature Article is now live for your reading pleasure.

Lightroom 3 Beta 2 – What’s New

April 2nd, 2010 by drg


Comments, questions, additions, etc. are welcome. Comment here or in the article commentary as you wish.

Please, if you are testing or trying Lightroom 3, post comments to Adobe as well.

Adobe Forums: Lightroom 3 - Comment link.

This feedback will make a much better product in the final form. The feedback has already generated noticeable improvements from Beta 1 to Beta 2.

Have fun and check out the (it will grow for a few more days) Special Gallery samples from Screen Shots to edited output from Lightroom 3 Beta Release 2.

[SmartWombat]

It's been mixed for me.
Processing is indeed faster than LR2.6 but it hangs up completely generating previews.
So it imports very fast, then can't display anything.

I have both on the same machine at work, and the processing results between 2.6 and 3b2 are different. I'm not sure which I prefer, or which is more accurate to the scene.

If I use the same "Lightroom_3 beta SpGa" keywords, mine would appear in your link except you used "name=drg" as part of the search.

Do you want to widen it to use my contributions if I use the same keywords?

[drg]

It's been mixed for me.
Processing is indeed faster than LR2.6 but it hangs up completely generating previews.
So it imports very fast, then can't display anything.

I have both on the same machine at work, and the processing results between 2.6 and 3b2 are different. I'm not sure which I prefer, or which is more accurate to the scene.

If I use the same "Lightroom_3 beta SpGa" keywords, mine would appear in your link except you used "name=drg" as part of the search.

Do you want to widen it to use my contributions if I use the same keywords?

All fixed for additions. I would like to try to keep additions to those that show variations on particular new features such as Watermarking examples, Noise Reduction of High, Higher, and Ridiculous ISO Noise Reduction, tonal curve tricks and toys.

I've noticed that if I'm trying to do too much on the machine it, LR3B2 slows down, and I get memory problems reported by Windows. Some sort of failure to release memory correctly I'd wager. Even on a multi-core 4Gb XP Pro machine. A moment or two of thumb twiddling and closing a window or two and all returns to normal. I think. But it is a beta, so it is still worth a report.

On Windows 7 I couldn't get the tethered shooting to work with either a Canon 1Ds Mark II or a Nikon D3 I borrowed for the attempt. I knew the Canon probably wouldn't work according to the release notes in 64-bit mode (I hope they fix this or I'll definitely need to spend more money later this year). I did get a Rebel to work.



Those who want to add an image feel free to do so, just please add a brief note about what it demonstrates about the LR3 beta release.

We'll create a separate gallery for the 'real thing' later this year with the official Lightroom 3 release and review.

To Add images to the LR3 Beta Release 2 'Special Gallery:

Add these three keywords to your image

Lightroom_3
beta
SpGa

It will then appear when the Special Gallery link is activated.
(images subject to editing only under dire circumstance)

[SmartWombat]

I'm running a 4-core XP Pro machine as well.
And after importing 4599 images it's used 99% of physical RAM, 2.2G of virtual memory and CPU usage is stuck at 100%
It's hit over 1400 page faults/sec and the whole machine is unresponsive.
I am pretty sure it's just beta.

I've also run into an issue on first install.
Apparently when you click the "Import" button for the first time it goes out and inspects all your drives.
In my case that's a 4TB NAS and two 3TB NAS, plus the local disks.
A total of 10 1/2 terabytes of space for it to go and inspect.
That probably wouldn't take too long, but having a faulty SD card in one of the 4 card reader slots made the process hang, I think.

[drg]

I'm running a 4-core XP Pro machine as well.
And after importing 4599 images it's used 99% of physical RAM, 2.2G of virtual memory and CPU usage is stuck at 100%
It's hit over 1400 page faults/sec and the whole machine is unresponsive.
I am pretty sure it's just beta.

I've also run into an issue on first install.
Apparently when you click the "Import" button for the first time it goes out and inspects all your drives.
In my case that's a 4TB NAS and two 3TB NAS, plus the local disks.
A total of 10 1/2 terabytes of space for it to go and inspect.
That probably wouldn't take too long, but having a faulty SD card in one of the 4 card reader slots made the process hang, I think.

Brave Man. I wouldn't even think about putting that many photos in it yet. I stopped at around a thousand with the first Release. I started getting similar problems with this version while having Microsoft Office open with a couple of Excel windows and a Word window plus a few browser windows and of course LR3B2. I closed the Office and twiddled my fingers for a few and it all came back finally.

[SmartWombat]

There's no point in testing if you don't stress it
I'm getting different result with the Canon and Olympus raw files.
Process 2010 seems worse for noise with .ORF and better with .CR2

[drg]

There's no point in testing if you don't stress it
I'm getting different result with the Canon and Olympus raw files.
Process 2010 seems worse for noise with .ORF and better with .CR2

I'm good at breaking software. So I proceed with caution to start.

That's an interesting note about the Olympus RAW files. My first inclination would be that ADOBE hasn't done enough testing with the output of some cameras to have a well refined model. From the first Release to this one I saw a big difference (trying to find some good 'clear' examples) in the results of image processing. That was almost all with Canon and a few Nikon Images. I pulled out the Sigma and am running more Nikon D3 images to see what I find from those.

[SmartWombat]

I would agree on the focus of their work on Canon/Nikon after support for .dng files.
Just loaded 29539 images (all of 2009) in 4 hours 45 minutes.
Which is better than Lightroom 2 Beta managed, that version never ran for long enough to load a year's worth of images.

[drg]

An bug in the Watermarking feature prevents files that are off the main system drive from always being available for inclusion as graphic files to use to watermark an image. It may also be that there's some file path corruption or degradation as the Watermark menu finds and uses system resources under MS-Windows to display the files, just doesn't properly load and use the graphic???

Anyone else have a similar issue from USB drives, NAS or other networked drives, or even other storage devices including DVD or CD or even flash drives???

There are a couple more images in the Special Gallery posted and several more to go when I get right balance of 'effects'.

[SmartWombat]

Just added:



This shows the same Olympus E-P1 raw (.ORF) file processed in Lightroom 3 Beta 2 (left) and in Lightroom 2.6 (right).
The centre panel is the computed difference between the images shown in false colour - black = no difference.

BeyondCompare from Scooter Software is a great tool, I recommend it.

[SmartWombat]

Noise reduced images from LR3b2.
I'm impressed by the improvement in the noise reduction.

[drg]

That's a cool tool! Do the files have to be exactly the same size to work? For the visual diff anyway I bet it does.

There's a way to do this in most editing programs that pretty simple, certainly if they support layers or a similar technique.

The new Process 2010 NR implementation is pretty impressive from the testing I've done so far. And it doesn't seem to lock up or bog down like some features . . .

[SmartWombat]

Noise reduction - comparison.
If you just switch the process to 2010 in LR3b2, with the Luminance and Colour sliders at maximum - then the image looks worse than in LR2.
But if you tweak the sliders, you can remove more colour noise and still retain detail.

LR2, best result


LR3 beta 2 with same parameters


LR3 beta 2, best result