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Adobe Photoshop Lighroom 3 is the latest version of the popular photography editing software. While amateur users should stick with a cheaper photo editing option (like the many versions that come pre-installed on today’s personal computers), professional photographers and avid photography fans should definitely uprgrade to Lightroom 3. Lightroom runs around $300 to start, with severe discounts available for teachers and students. Proof of student/faculty ID is required. Lightroom costs around $100 to upgrade an older version of the software.
Users of older Lightroom versions will navigate the new software’s layout pretty easily. New users can take advantage of the incredibly helpful Adobe Lightroom 3 video tutorials found on the Adobe website’s help section. Product expert Julieanne Kost patiently walks through each feature in a series of videos that run anywhere from 2 to 18 minutes. As an added benefit, the photos Kost demonstrates with are breathtaking.
Perhaps Lightroom 3′s most talked-about feature is the lens correction feature, which auto-corrects distortions, chromatic aberration, or vignetting caused by lens distortion. Users can create a profile for just about any lens-camera combination and then share them online for other users. Saved user-created presets will save an incredible amount of time when editing pictures from the same camera lens combinations. Experts are also speculating that this easy auto-correct tool will lower costs for camera lenses, which are currently laboriously manufactured for exact precision. Recent digital cameras, like the Canon PowerShot line, now auto-correct within the camera for lens distortion.
Lightroom 3 also provides enhanced import settings, so users can now rename a batch of photos for a shoot title plus sequential numbering or a shoot title combined with the image’s original numbering. For example, under the sequential shoot renaming system, all pictures from a New York City shoot can be named NYC_001, NYC_002, NYC_003, and so forth. Under the shoot and original numbering system, Lightroom takes IMG_2345, IMG_2346, and IMG_2347 and renames them NYC_2345, NYC_2346, and NYC_2347.