1. Brand new import screen makes it much easier to get your photos from your camera/memory card onto your hard disk in the format you want and with the initial settings you need
2. Tethered shooting is now a lot easier for those of you that need this
3. Drastically improved noise reduction (this is the biggie!) with amazing results allowing you to do more in one product without having to break your workflow and move to another tool
4. Lens correction automatically reduces lens defects like geometric distortion, chromatic aberration, and vignetting
5. Image watermarking with improved options for placement, style and opacity
6. More flexible print layouts to allow you greater creativity when outputting your work
7. Integration with online sites such as Flickr (including two way updates for comments/favourites)
8. Its just faster!

You can see some of the above features in action over at the LightroomLab blog where they’ve posted a video of their top five new features. Additionally, Thomas Hawk has posted an article on his blog showing his take on some of the new features. He’s especially blown away by the noise reduction features. I’m ordering my copy today, so hopefully will have some more articles once I’ve had a chance to play around with it more.

LightroomLab: Five New Features of Lightroom 3 for Professional Photographers

Thomas Hawk: The Most Significant Advancement In Photo Noise Reduction I Have Ever Seen

One such committed individual is Brandon Oelling over on the X= Blog. After soliciting feedback, one reader emailed to indicate that they wanted more information on the items in the right-hand menu of the Develop module – especially things such as the tone curve and detail panel.

Thankfully Brandon has come to their aid with a great post listing each of the tools available in the Develop panels along with links to articles that go into more detail on each.

So if you’re having trouble with the develop module or just want a refresher on what a particular panel does then check out the X= article “Everything in the Right Hand Menu“. As for my Lightroom series I’ll see if I can get something out this year (but no promises!).

Like many of the other articles (and me!) he recommends converting to DNG and listed a selection of the concerns and comments around why others might not feel comfortable doing this.

Follow the link below to check out the full article on his site.

To DNG or Not to DNG? (Lightroom Killer Tips)

A recent post on The Lightroom Lab covers an oft overlooked feature in Lightroom – Keyword Sets. These allow you to create small collections of keywords that you use frequently or that are specific to certain shoots and allow you to add them to selected images via a single click.

Follow the link below for more information on this including a handy tip (which I didn’t know about) to switch between multiple keyword sets via a quick keyboard shortcut.

The Lightroom Lab: Keyword Sets Make Repetitive Keywording Push Button Easy

1. Use Solo Mode To Tame All Those Panels
2. Use Collections instead of Folders
3. Store all your photos inside one main folder
4. Do as much work in Lightroom as possible
5. Create Presets and Templates whenever possible
6. How to Save Your Image as a JPEG
7. Turn off Auto Show for panels
8. Throw away your old backups
9. It’s OK to have multiple Catalogs
10. Ask yourself whether you need lots of keywords or not

Now most of these I agree 100% with. I’m not that great and creating presets and templates but hey – there’s so many good ones available out there I tend to use them and tweak as required. Plus of course, considering my free Keyword Sets I would say that answer to number 10 is “Yes you do need keywords!”.

Scott Kelby – 10 Things I Would Tell New Lightroom Users

So in a similar theme I thought I would reference a great post over on Lightroom News which covers using plug-ins in Lightroom.

Although LR v1 was pretty limited in this respect, since v2 and following Adobe opening things up there is now a great list of plug-ins to make your life easier when using the tool. These range from utilities and metadata plug-ins to export options to help you create online galleries or upload to your favourite photo sharing site.

The article on Lightroom News is only short so I’m not going to replicate much of it here, however it does list, and link to, the majority of the main plug-ins available so its a great page to bookmark.

Lightroom News: An Introduction to Lightroom Plug-ins

I’ve added a new keyword list to my collection of keywords for Lightroom. This time it focuses on terms used to describe weather and associated atmospheric conditions – rain, cloud types, fog/haze, storms, etc.

I’m not 100% happy with the list at the moment but thought I’d post it anyway. So if you’ve any suggestions for things I’ve missed or better ways to sub-categorise some of the items please use the contact form to let me know.

Otherwise, head on over to the keywords page (link at top) and download the new list.

Its already been widely reported (CNET, Scott Kelby) that if you have a large number of exports to do, then breaking them into chunks that run at the same time can sometimes speed things up. However the LightroomLab has just posted a range of other options that might help speed things up.

The article includes ten tips for speeding things up, as follows:

1. Optimise your catalog
2. Get a better computer
3. Don’t automatically write changes to XMP
4. Close other programs
5. Restart occasionally
6. Build previews before you need them
7. Tweak your machine
8. Enlarge the camera raw cache
9. Watch your catalog size
10. Embed metadata when importing

Follow the link below for the full details on the above.

LightroomLab: Optimising Lightroom for Best Performance

If so, here’s some more!

The LightroomLab has a post detailing some more official (and not so official – i.e. Twitter) places where you can find help. This includes:

• The official Adobe help site
• Forums
• Twitter resources
• Blogs and other LR specific sites

Check out the link below for the full article.

LightroomLab: More Lightroom Help

To this end, the X= Blog has posted an article about how to approach keywording. Its not always as obvious as you might think and they provide some good examples.

One of the issues I faced early on is that I ended up using subtle variations on the same keyword by mistake – plurals and singulars for example. There’s also the issue about how specific to get. Should you tag something as Water, or should it be Lake or even Reservoir? Perhaps it should be all three! This is one of the reasons I made the effort to produce standardised lists of keywords.

So if your Lightroom catalog is getting out of hand or you want to start adding keywords to your images in a more methodical manner then follow the link below to read the full article.

X= Blog: The Name Game – Keywording and Tagging in Lightroom