Lightroom 3

Adobe has made available a public beta of Lightroom 3 and I've been trying it out. The rendering or processing engine is supposed to be much improved, although I don't see very dramatic differences in my photos. This rainy afternoon photo uses two other new features that I do appreciate: improved noise reduction (had to shoot this at ISO 800) and custom watermarking. After carefully removing noise, I tried a third new feature, adding grain. Might seem crazy to remove the noise, then add grain, but I don't think so. The grain adds a rainy-day effect that is just what I wanted - and which is quite different from the effect of the original noise. And the add-grain sliders give me much control over the amount, size and "roughness" of the grain, where with the noise-removal sliders, I pretty much control only the amount. In this shot, there's a fair amount of small but very rough grain.

From 20091026 rainy day