December 11th - Adobe Lightroom 3

Adobe Lightroom 3 in my opinion is the ultimate post production tool for any photographer.  It is an extremely powerful program that speeds up your workflow and puts even more control into the hands of the photographer. Easy importing and extremely powerful organisational tools quickly turn your jumbled images into easy to find collections. Even for organisationally challenged photographers, such as my good self, Lightroom 3 makes filing and finding your images easy.

Post development is amazing in Lightroom 3, you can make one or several adjustments and synchronise that change among as many images as you wish. For example imagine you don’t get the exposure or the white balance quite right on your shots of the bride and groom in the church. All you need to do is adjust one and then highlight the rest of the similar images and synchronise those adjustments. The list goes on of the ease you can do your post production within Lightroom 3 especially the noise reduction tool which is second to none; you can massively reduce the noise in your image with just the touch of a slider.

Once you are satisfied with your post production there is several ways you can output your images. Export them to tiffs or JPEG images for example; the really cool thing about this is that you can highlight has many images as you wish and export them all to a specific size, location, file name and add your own watermark. This helps to speed up your workflow dramatically. It doesn't stop there you can publish a wed gallery in HTML or Flash which is a great way to showcase your work.

The print feature offers nice presets and customisable layout features. Single images and packages can quickly be created and printed. Draft and regular printing is supported as well as the easiest contact sheet creation I have seen. Lightroom 3 improves further by adding more customisable package options to fit the photographer's needs.

This is just a quick overview of what Lightroom 3 is capable of and I could write pages on the different features that Lightroom gives the photographer whether you are a keen amateur or professional it has something for everyone