The big news as of yesterday is that Adobe quietly released the full version of Lightroom 3! I’ve been using the Beta for quite some time now and really enjoy a few of the new features, especially vignette and noise reduction.
Is it worth the upgrade?
I would say that if you already own a copy of Lightroom 2, then it’s definitely worth the $99 upgrade. Lightroom 3 is faster, has a few new bells and whistles, and the RAW conversion image quality appears better (the conversion engine is based on Photoshop CS5’s Camera RAW 6.1). If you’re new to using Lightroom then I would definitely recommend getting a copy of the full version which will set you back $299. I fully believe that Lightroom is the quintessential image processing program that every photographer should be using.
If you’d like to learn more about how to use Lightroom to bring the best out of your images, check out our Super Photo Editing Skills video tutorial!
Lightroom Before/After: Part 2
I thought I would leave you with a quick Lightroom before after. You can try this out with your shiny new version of LR3 or kick it old school with your still completely useable version of LR2 ;)
I know Part 1 I listed out a few steps, but I’m going to stop doing that because I’m really not much of a “Step 1” “Step 2” kinda guy. On the left hand side you can see our straight B&W conversion, and on the right is with a bit of Lightroom love!
What I want to talk about mainly in this before/after is gradients.
I used a darkening gradient from the top to the middle of the image to darken the brighter ceiling.
It’s not like the ceiling was ridiculously bright and needed darkening, it was more done to draw the eye of the viewer to the subjects more easily.
Try taking a look at both images and see how comfortably your eye falls to the couple in the after image. We’re going to explore more subtle techniques like this in future before/afters :)
Oh and about the B&W conversion, I pretty much just added a bit of contrast and brightness. Simple!
