Just downloaded LR3 Beta 2 from Adobe. Not much time to test, however, a couple of observations.
1) Luminance NR - it's good. Really good, at least in my initial testing on some noisy ISO 800 sony A850 birdy shots. Retains feather detail with minimal effort. It may actually put noise ninja out of a job.
2) Loads my RAWs faster when I go 1:1 view.
3) I'm pretty sure they'll suck $300 from me when it hits retail
I never liked the recovery slider in LR - if I had a highlight too blown and a slight exposure adjustment diddn't work, guess what, the picture was trash.
Hatcher wrote:
•Native tethered shooting support for select Nikon and Canon DSLR cameras
Sweet! I hope it works as well or better than Nikons' Camera Control Pro 2!
Just tried it with my D3s - no Live View and its pretty basic meaning all adjustments must be made on camera and cannot be done through LR. Its basically there for screen capture and not as feature rich as CCP2 - but a nice feature none the less
domdog31 wrote:
Just tried it with my D3s - no Live View and its pretty basic meaning all adjustments must be made on camera and cannot be done through LR. Its basically there for screen capture and not as feature rich as CCP2 - but a nice feature none the less
Yeah, I figured the first iteration might be sparse. Personally, I don't adjust from the laptop, but nice to be able to when needed.
Tell me how you use the Exposure, recovery and Brightness sliders together
I used to always use LR 2.3 until recently trying other raw converters. I now use Nx2-I find the highlight and shadow recovery is in a different league. Nx2 is so much smoother in both of these areas, I don't like how it affects skin tones in LR. The most obvious is with skies and higher iso's.
I generally tweak the exposure -1/3 of a stop, then alt+recovery slider, see how far I can go with it, then adjust the midtones/ brightness accordingly-whilst trying not to destroy skintones etc. I seem to be able to recover more in nx2 without it affecting other areas so drastically.The same with fill light/shadow recovery-LR is/was blotchy.(it seems improved with this beta.) I wish I had the patience when I previously tried Nx2.
From now on I will use nx2 for problem files and for every print, but I love the cataloging and UI and speed of LR.
I've just had a little play with beta 3.2 and the luminance noise control seems very promising and I think they've tweaked the recovery slider too as one of my problem images doesn't show any clipping anymore,along with improvements to fill light-or were these already improved in beta1? I've uninstalled 1 now and didn't test it much tbh. I am going to test version 2 a lot more.
bakka303 wrote:
I used to always use LR 2.3 until recently trying other raw converters. I now use Nx2-I find the highlight and shadow recovery is in a different league. Nx2 is so much smoother in both of these areas, I don't like how it affects skin tones in LR. The most obvious is with skies and higher iso's.
I generally tweak the exposure -1/3 of a stop, then alt+recovery slider, see how far I can go with it, then adjust the midtones/ brightness accordingly-whilst trying not to destroy skintones etc. I seem to be able to recover more in nx2 without it affecting other areas so drastically.The same with fill light/shadow recovery-LR is/was blotchy.(it seems improved with this beta.) I wish I had the patience when I previously tried Nx2.
From now on I will use nx2 for problem files and for every print, but I love the cataloging and UI and speed of LR.
I've just had a little play with beta 3.2 and the luminance noise control seems very promising and I think they've tweaked the recovery slider too as one of my problem images doesn't show any clipping anymore,along with improvements to fill light-or were these already improved in beta1? I've uninstalled 1 now and didn't test it much tbh. I am going to test version 2 a lot more.
my experience is the exact Opposite and i have been the apologist for NX and NC for years. this new iteration of LR3 is better than NX in many cases Especially in the highlight recovery. I find NX's ability there to be severly lacking and most times down right ugly. Also is the total lack of ability to Reduce contrast in NX vs LR. LR in this regard has no peer IMO, not to say i do not use NX because I do if i want the absolute best from my studio set top work where i have controlled all the elements wrt lighting and contrast etc. Speed is also so amazing in LR, for me there is NO One Stop Shop for Raw Editors, you must have many tools in the tool shed
Oooh, downloading now. Tethered support and luminance noise reduction make me excited!
You know if they keep increasing the quality of noise reduction my reasons for upgrading my D300 keep diminishing
Edit: WOW! Luminance noise reduction is high up on the awesome scale! Extremely impressive, you really have to tweak it and sharpening at the same time to not turn your image into a watercolor. I'll post examples later.
Does anyone see a noticeable difference using the 'Contrast' slider under luminance noise reduction? It's very subtle.
Yeah contrast Luma NR is very, very subtle. As a matter of fact, the only time I've really seen it make any difference is when I was reducing lots of background / bokeh noise from distance trees - the tree outline / noise sorta "stood out" a bit more, but it's very subtle from 0 to 100 - almost not really messing with FWICT.
Excuse the large image size please. This is two 100% crops from a D300 @ ISO 6400. The left is LR3 Beta 1, right Beta 2. There was slightly more detail in the hair before jpg compression on the B2 side.
It is as far as I can tell, running very fast on my laptop now.
Still have yet to mess around with the development really and see how I like it, but I already liked what I was seeing with the beta 1.
Hrm, last night I ran into my first bit of "trouble", if you want to call it that.
I was editing a photo of a car interior, where I had focused on the side-mirror and the grey of the interior was bokeh-ed nicely (105mm f/2.5 AIS, sorry I'm at work, no pictures).
ANYWAY, in LR 3, I switch the camera profile to "neutral" and get this interesting purple/magenta gradient in the grey area. I open up NX2 and the image (which was shot in Neutral) and the discoloring isn't there.
I then go back to LR3 and switch "Camera Neutral" to "Adobe Standard" and everything is just fine. Normally, the colors on for Adobe Standard I don't like, for but whatever reason, on this particular shot, they're actually more accurate than the Nikon "Neutral" profile in lightroom.
Just an FYI - I will upload samples when I get home late tonight.
I've never noticed discoloration when using LR3 neutral before, so maybe this particular shot shows some weirdness that normally doesn't appear.
