Travel Photography - Lightroom 3 beta

Lightroom 3 is available (http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/lightroom3/) to the public

You beat me to it. ^

I have been playing with it since downloaded. As a LR2 user, I found these new features in LR3 beta particularly great & worth the money for upgrade:

* State-of-the-art noise reduction to help you perfect your high ISO shots {I tried it on some shots with ISO3200, with good results}

* Portable sharable slideshows with audio—designed to give you more flexibility and impact on how you choose to share your images, you can now save and export your slideshows as videos and include audio

* Film grain simulation tool for enhancing your images to look as gritty as you want

.....

* State-of-the-art noise reduction to help you perfect your high ISO shots {I tried it on some shots with ISO3200, with good results}



Excellent! I never found the LR2 noise reduction to be very effective. Had intended to get Noise Ninja (or something equivalent) but will wait.

Any news about release of the final product. Not a good time for me to be playing with a beta release.

I need to try this one out. The comparisons between LR2.5 and LR3 were pretty convincing over on the Flickr Lightroom group.

I've been playing with it for nearly 2 weeks now. Improved noise reduction is certainly the big conversion improvement. The UI and DAM aspect are only moderately changed, and the demosaicing seems to have been tweaked a hair. But the improvement to NR - reducing noise while maintining detail in the image, are a fairly significant jump.

I havent[' tried the ability to create slideshow with audio - that was a major gap in previous versions. I rarely go beyond the Develop module but I can see this feature getting a lot of use.

GA isn't announced, but the Beta is good through April, so I'd bet on a Feb/March release

I'd better get this version - although I need to make some space on my hard disk first.

I'm looking forward to the NR features in particular. Then again, the Lightroom Betas/RC's have always seemed very polished....

Excellent! I never found the LR2 noise reduction to be very effective. Had intended to get Noise Ninja (or something equivalent) but will wait.

Any news about release of the final product. Not a good time for me to be playing with a beta release.

History can't be trusted:
LR1 beta-to-release was over a year; LR2 beta-to-release was a few months. No official words from Adobe re release date of LR3. Some "experts" speculate maybe next summer. Beta trial period will end at end of April.

Some "experts" hinted not to count on building large catelogs with LR3 Beta, as there is guaranty that such catelogs will be importable to LR2 or the then released version of LR3. Just play with it, some suggested. That's what I am doing. Having some fun making collage out of the custom print module.

I havent[' tried the ability to create slideshow with audio - that was a major gap in previous versions.

I have not spent lots of time on it yet. Preliminarily, I found that the slideshow module is quite cool as it is easy to use. You can synchronize the length (as in timing) of the slideshow to match your audio (such as a musical piece) without any effort.