10 Best Lightroom Training Course

Best Lightroom Training Course in 2023

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Product Review: Adobe Lightroom 3

Adobe Lightroom 3 is your professional quality image editing and image handling program that is easy to use and inexpensive enough for the amateur or semi professional photographer.

Ease of Use, Performance: 22/25
Look amp; Feel: 23/25
Features 24/25
How much I enjoy 21/25

Total: 90/100

Photographers, marketing and product managers, reviewers, journalists and so many more jobs both big(read as professional) and small use images or pictures. Managing and editing those images takes software solutions that are easy to use, simplify organizing and make editing quick with professional looking results.

Adobe Lightroom 3 is an image organizer and editor that specializes in importing, editing and exporting numerous images or files already on your computer or directly from your camera to folders on your computer. Importing and exporting is a whole section with features that allow you to manipulate or change the images going in or out of the program.

File manipulation can be changing file format, resizing, changing resolution, adding a watermark or even adding data to the image that is read as part of the image. Lightroom started as purely a file or image manager and evolved into an image editor and manager/organizer for semi professionals or professionals who do not need the full Photoshop program.

Photoshop is expensive so Adobe with encouragement from customers designed a program that not only organized folders of images but edits them. Editing the images is not done just like Photoshop, Adobe's flagship program or even a condensed version like Photoshop elements.

Adobe took a look at Lightroom in its first couple of incarnations and decided, again with encouragement from customers, to add editing. The editing is a bit different than Photoshop but in some ways identical or similar with things like crop and resize being the same.

Handy tools like Spot Removal are similar to Clone from Photoshop but works a bit differently, many basic tools in Lightroom are similar or identical to Photoshop but some have only recently been added. Photoshop has been using curves for color and other adjustments and in Lightroom 3 they have added one curve for tone split between four sectiions.

Other great additions to Lightroom 3 are tethered shooting integration, an new import window, automatic lens correction, perspective correction and camera RAW 6 integration. While this edition of Lightroom does not have a lot of ground breaking new features it does great with what they have added.

Lightroom 3 organizes images, edits and gets them ready as a final product whether they are on your computer or from your camera. Tethering allows you to connect your computer to your DSLR directly, viewing images them as well as have them added in Lightroom 3 immediately.

Tethering can be done with a USB, Firewire or remotely using wireless depending on your camera and setup but the nice thing is directly viewing pictures right on your computer immediately. You can directly edit or adjust the image as well as view it right away without having to import or do any other functions then add it to a collection.

This is perfect for not only clients who are watching you as you shoot and edit or just store for later use but being able to see the pictures on a large screen right away. Other features like adding curves to your adjustments may seem small but they help keep workflow fast and efficient which is what this program is all about.

Two of the bigger features are the lens correction and general faster performance when doing time sensitive tasks like importing and exporting. While it may not seem all that important when using Lightroom 3 on occasion using the import and export function can take time.

Just how much time depends of course on file size but with my limited use I have noticed this even before Lightroom 3 was announced. Importing or exporting a file of photos would take just enough time to be annoying but not enough time to say, go get another cup of coffee.

With Lightroom 3 you can perform the same import or export in much less time, I compared adding a file to Lightroom 2 and Lightroom 3 just checking the time it took. Lightroom 2 took about 15 seconds to import a 390 Megabyte file of images while Lightroom 3 took about three seconds.

Exporting also decreases the time a lot for the newest edition for a much faster handling of photos in JPG, RAW and converting to DNG formats. File handling is very much a faster feature which makes your initial peek at Lightroom 3 off to a great start but other features are just as good.

Lightroom 3 features like automatic lens correction and perspective adjustments mean correcting lens defects that are known and saved as profiles. The lens correction adds a couple dozen popular lens profiles as well as the ability to add more and create your own changed profiles.

You can create your own profiles for lens correction or use premade ones available from Adobe or use ones others have created to correct defects like geometric distortion, chromatic aberration and vignetting. These corrections smooth and flatten out the inherent distortion a round lens has when taking a picture on a rectangular sensor and other adjustments for lens defects.

Perspective correction fixes the same type of problems, distortion of your subject being distorted from taking the picture at angles to it. These powerful corrections add a couple of great adjustments to quickly and easily correct the biggest problems with images.

Other great improvements like curves for tone, color, brightness and hue add even more features that are easy to use and much like ones in Photoshop. Both the quick import and export adjustments you can make to a whole folder of images and the individual corrections using curves and other features make a great and simple way to edit images.

Using Lightroom 3 you can edit images, change folders of images using lens correction, resize folders of images and more with the easy to use program features. Things that also make Lightroom 3 and previous versions great are before and after comparisons and tracking of editing adjustments during your work.

Using the features like comparison and edit tracking you can see the things you've changed and compare them to see just what changes occurred. You can also remove changes individually using the History that lists each adjustment in easy to understand wording.

The features that have been added or just enhanced work toward fixing and making Lightroom a much better product and shows that Adobe is trying their best to give you the value you need. It's really simple, if you need an image editing program that features productivity and ease of use for both batch images and individual editing Lightroom 3 is perfect.

Lightroom 3 goes beyond the basics of image editing like Elements and costs less than Photoshop, Adobe continues to work hard at giving users what they need. Lightroom 3 also has the great image organizing that helps you keep your folders or what Adobe calls Collections in order to improve your work flow.

Lightroom 3 does have a few drawbacks like not being able to use Live View while using tethered mode but being able to view images right after the "shutter" clicks is fine. One general problem some may experience is trying to use Lightroom if you're already used to Photoshop and the differences between the two.

These differences are not that big and only a problem if you have gotten used to Photoshop before trying Lightroom but it is something I feel worth mentioning. Tools and general workflow needs to be learned and familiarized in the program you're going to be using most often but this is true of any new program.

Lightroom 3 has some great new features, a few that have been fixed in important ways and a general improvement where it was needed, check out Adobe Lightroom at Adobe.com.