Seeing as my planned post got eaten, here some of my favourite things in Lightroom 3 Beta.
Backup on Exit. You no longer have to wait on the catalog to back up before starting Lightroom!
Publish. You can now control your Flickr Photostream from within Lightroom. Add, remove or update photos to the stream. See Favourite count and comments! Jeffrey Friedl has updated his Flickr plugin to be compatible, this includes options for groups and sets, amongst other things.
Noise Reduction. The new Noise Reduction, while colour noise only, is fantastic, especially on Concert images with high ISO’s.
Custom Package. No more messing around with hacks, simply create a multi image freeform print from Lightroom.
Colour background in Print. I guess Epson will love this one. You can have any background colour to your print. Even black.
Watermarking. A basic watermarking tool allows you to watermark images sent to Print, Web and for Export. I just want to say that LR2/Mogrify is still better for watermarking with borders, but having watermarking on your web export is cracking!
Grain. Finally a way to give Film like texture to images in Lightroom.
Slideshow Video. At last! Video export from Slideshow. With music! h2.64 movies from Lightroom.
Import: Import has seen major changes. Now a pseudo module, it effectively makes getting images into Lightroom a joy. There are 2 views: Expanded and Compact. There are also Import Presets to make life easier getting stuff in!
Collections in Develop: Less need to jump out to Library all the time. Yes!
And there’s my quick list!
Update: I see Scott Kelby has a similar list. Well, I’m sure others will have similar ones too.
Atma, book publishing definitely got closer with Custom Package. I use a few services so this means I can create the layouts, print to Jpeg, and the bang the ready go pages in to InDesign and then off I go..
The only thing that Aperture has over Lightroom is the EXCELELNT option to create a book. I sincerely hope they will include this feature in the final release…but given it's not in the Beta, I'm assuming it's not on the road-map. Big shame 🙁
Hey Micheal, 2.5 has the same support as 3Beta. Still only provisional support.
Hi Eric, that wasn't what I was referring to, so I'll expand it. Jeffrey has feature that the built in Flickr publish doesn't have.
Hi Sean, minor correction on Publish: The Flickr integration is built-in, not from J. Friedl. We haven't yet released details on the Publish SDK, so the plug-in authors haven't yet had a chance to start working with it. (There will be a plug-in SDK for publish; just hasn't been polished and documented yet.)
Don't forget Canon 7D support 😉