For the photographers: Adobe Lightroom 3 Beta

[Guest Simon*]

It seems there are a fair few of us either interested in, or trying to get the most out of our photography. Not everyone has photoshop, and not everyone has all that much experience using it.

To this end I'd like to recommend Adobe's Lightroom for anyone who wants to have a crack at some photo post- processing. Lightroom is a "digital darkroom" that has taken a lot of Photoshop's processing power and streamlined it into a package for managing, non-destructively tweaking and producing images for output. And even better the current beta release (Version 3) is free to download and use until April 10. I got addicted to LR2 and have been on this beta version since it came out last year.

It's very much trial and error to get the effects you want, but there is plenty of online support, tips and tricks and a lot of presets you can apply to your pictures too.

All you have to do is register on adobe.com and it's freely available for Mac and Win 32 and 64 versions.

Enjoy

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/lightroom3/

[*Glenn* 854]

I just got CS4 & Nikon Capture NX2... its a minefeild learning how to use everything...including the new camera & new laptop. I've downloaded a whole pile of tutorials off the net and plan playing in the weekend.

Edited February 8, 2010 by *Glenn*

[Guest Simon*]

Yeah I know what you mean Glenn, the learning curve sure is steep. This is one of the meain reasons I like Lightroom - it's all in one place and quick and easy to do. You build up a couple of favourite techniques pretty quickly.

Example: Here's 2 of my own pics I just tweaked, each in about 30 secs.

[localdevdas 2]

^^^first pic looks awesome!