I spent a day the week before last and most of last Wednesday with Eric Chan , Tom Hogarty, Julianne Kost and a couple other members of the Lightroom development team in a pre-Beta release training sessiona for Lightroom 3.

There are a lot of changes, including some significant ones to the webgallery feature. What I was most impressed with were the changes to the import process controls and dialogs; significant improvements to the capture sharpening tools and the noise reduction tools in the develop module; the print module; the slideshow module as well as the web gallery changes.

There are even more changes coming later but I can't talk about them.

I definitely recommend you download the Lr3 beta and try it. Currently the beta period runs through April 10.

The link to the lr3 beta is: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/lightroom3/

I'm downloading it right now, but if I'm reading this correctly it wont open up any of my current LR catalogs. Is that just for the beta or a permanent change?

The beta version is intended to provide an opportunity to give feedback and as such, does not read, upgrade or import catalogs from previous versions of Lightroom. If you currently own Lightroom, please continue to use Lightroom 1 or higher for your primary workflow needs.

Lr3 Has a redesigned DB for better management of massive collections. The beta has no converter. The final release will.

This has been discussed in the wedding forum.

My take, SLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOW. Try loading a couple hundred pictures and work on them. NO WAY NO HOW.

I like the tweaks they've done, but I sure hope the speed issue is resolved.

j.curtis wrote:
This has been discussed in the wedding forum.

My take, SLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOW. Try loading a couple hundred pictures and work on them. NO WAY NO HOW.

I like the tweaks they've done, but I sure hope the speed issue is resolved.


I have now loaded up a catalog of 4000 and don't notice any slowness. In fact, when navigating between images in the Develop module the images load faster. This is one of the stated improvements that Adobe made.