Adobe Releases Lightroom 3 Beta

Adobe has released for imediate download, Lightroom 3 public beta. It is expected that the version update will ship in April of 2010, but this beta will give users a taste of what’s to come. According to reports, Adobe is reworking the RAW conversion engine, which is good news for Lightroom users. Image Quality of RAW conversions is probably the single most frequent complaint of Lightroom… well, maybe second to the lack of softproofing. Adobe has tweaked the print tools in this beta version 3, so it is hoped that Adobe will surprise users with softproofing capabilities in the shipping version next spring. Alas, the beta doesn’t have a softproofing feature. “State-of-the-art noise reduction” is listed as one of the updated features, which should help to wrangle those high ISO images if one doesn’t wish to use a third-party noise reduction tool such as NIK Dfine or Noise Ninja.

You can download the Lightroom 3 beta here. It’s a free download. There’s a “First Look” preview of the beta at The Luminous Landscape, in which Michael Reichmann sheds some light on the upcoming version features.

I’m not a Lightroom user, but I’m happy to see this version upgrade coming for those who are. Users of the beta can provide feedback to Adobe via the Lightroom forums.