Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 Released

Photography enthusiasts, professionals and amateurs alike should be glad to hear that Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 is now out of beta and is available to anyone to try out or buy. The latest update to the photo-management tool comes with plenty of interesting things to make it a worthwhile upgrade. The entire program has been re-written and Adobe says the emphasis all the way was on performance. But Lightroom 3 also comes with some new or improved features like the better noise reduction and lens correction.

“There have been over 600,000 downloads of the Lightroom 3 public beta, which has supplied us with a huge amount of valuable feedback from a passionate community of professional and advanced amateur photographers,” Kevin Connor, vice president of product management for Digital Imaging at Adobe, said.

“The open dialog we have with our customers allows us to further improve Lightroom and provide the best tools they need to produce high-quality images. We’re happy to see that so many people are anxiously anticipating the final release, so they can start taking advantage of all the new features they had a hand in developing.”

One of the most touted features of the new release is the improved noise reduction. Adobe says it can restore even high-ISO images to give them a more natural feel. Also new is the lens correction tool, which is designed to fix some of the most common lens errors like geometric distortion, chromatic aberration, and vignetting.

As more and more DSLRs now shoot decent-quality video, Photoshop Lightroom 3 introduces support for video as well, to enable users to manage these files along with the photos. A redesigned import tool was introduced to make it easier to get the files from your camera to your computer. Plenty of other new features have been introduced for basic users, like the new Flickr integration, and professionals alike, like the tethered shooting option available for several Nikon and Canon cameras.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 is available for download here on Softpedia.