Lightroom 3 Beta is Out
At midnight last night Adobe opened up the free beta for their Lightroom 3.0 product. I’ve been trying to download it several times since then but I think that their servers are being hit pretty hard and haven’t actually had a chance to look at it yet myself because the download page keeps failing — a good problem to have I ‘m sure 
. I have seen screenshots from a presentation by Adobe on the product though and it looks like a nice improvement over 2.0. Tom Hogarty, the Lightroom Product Manager, has probably the best write up on the new features over at the Lightroom Journal. I’ll report more on my impressions on the new beta when I try it out soon.
Probably the two most significant improvements that I’m looking forward to playing with are the new post cropped vignetting tool (Lightroom’s old post crop vignetting tool made geometrically *perfect* vignetting while I prefer a more natural feel) which offers new styles of more natural vignetting as well as features to better sharpen and reduce noise in photos.
If you want to try to download the beta to try it out yourself, you can get it here. As mentioned before though, the page is likely getting hammered pretty hard with the beta only a few hours old so be patient.
This is how Thomas Hawk, uses his blog. This is in his own words :
“Ok, James, you’ve pissed me off. I’ve dropped my son at his game and am back home. You think you can fucking threaten me, for no reason, to make an example out of me? Fuck you.
I want you to be very clear about what is possible to go down when I write this blog post because internet mobs are frequently not easy to control. I’ve had experience with more than one and I fucking hate them. When they are out frequently they are out. All the I’m sorry’s I fucked up in the world after the fact frequently can’t fix them. That’s why I’m taking my time to be very careful about how this thing might go down and why I feel that I owe you a pretty detailed explanation ahead of time for what it might look like.
When I blog my post with your name in the headline, within 60 minutes or so it will be on the first page Google search results for your name. It will stay there for many years. Your name will be associated with someone who makes death threats on the internet and someone who wrote about potentially mugging me.
This will piss people off. I’m a pretty reasonable guy and well liked generally speaking by most people who follow my blog. In addition to my blog the post will go out to the 20,000 or so people combined who follow my Twitter/Friendfeed threads. It will be a sensationalistic juicy blog post and as such it will generate alot of attention.
I’m not sure where it will go. Simon Blint (mentioned above) moved out of his house for a while because he was petrified after getting death threats himself and people having figured out his home address and began publishing it on line.
I know you’re a big tough guy who doesn’t care about these sorts of things but I fucking don’t like being threatened and I’m never one to just sit down and fucking let it go when some fucking internet bully like you is threatening me.
So that’s where we are at. Consider yourself duly warned. “
What are you trying to achieve here, James? If you’re out to make TH look like the bad guy, you’re not doing a great job of it. You’re just looking like a weird, crazy stalker. It’s pretty embarrassing to be honest. I feel a little embarrassed for you. Maybe you should leave the basement for a day or two, take a walk, get some fresh air and you might see this whole incident in a new light.
Alastair, don’t worry about him. He’s just a troll. It’s actually a badge of honor to have them around. At least he’s a funny one. We were talking about him at our photowalk on Friday night and having a good laugh over all his comments and his passion. The other day he posted like 28 different comments all from the lyrics to Phil Collins’ “Against All Odds” I think I’m going to tape them all together in one piece and photograph it. He’s a funny dude. You should see the photo he’s got up on his website right now. Haha. He’s just having fun.
All he’s doing is coming across as being completely mental.
All these cheerleaders Thomas, they come out in droves, how does it feel to have so many people’s noses in your ass ?
Oh and Alistair, about your photos ….. ZZZZZzzzzzzz…..
Cheerleaders, that’s good one. I’ve got a comic in the comments… literally.
LR3 should be an awesome upgrade…
What I’m looking forward to:
1) Film grain
2) Better sharpening and noise reduction
3) Much better vignetting. What LR2 has now is just awful with it pouring black around the periphery.
4) Better RAW conversion
5) Exportable standalone slideshows as .mov files – hope there are some controls there…
6) Adding to Collections from the Develop module – no more going back and forth…
Oh and James, about your comments…….
ZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzz….
Is that the best you can do, recycling the same thing I say….. let me show you how retarded it looks
Oh and Alastair, about your comments ZZZZZZZzzzzzz…..
see ?
Come up with something original please, or just shut the fuck up. Go take some pictures, you need the practice….
and Alastair you’ve got shit on your nose, you might want to wipe it off…
Still no perspective correction though…
Yep, perspective correction would be awesome.