Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 has been Released!
A Quick Rundown of Available Resources to Help You Get Started
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 (LR3) is finally out of beta!
The Lightroom team’s official blog announced earlier this week that Lightroom 3 is Now Available. They also shared a list of Lightroom 3 Resources to get people started with the release and the Lightroom 3 Help is also available online including the downloadable PDF version for offline use.
To discover what the new release has to offer I’d suggest checking out:
- Ian’s Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3.0 Feature Review over at the Computer Darkroom
- What’s new in Lightroom 3 from Victoria Bampton
Needless to say I found the release compelling enough to have already upgraded from Lightroom 2!
Victoria will also be releasing her Adobe Lightroom 3 – The Missing FAQ book and eBook soon so its worthwhile keeping an eye out for that. Some excerpts from the book are available on her site now.
A few others have shared Lightroom 3 resource lists as well:
There are others but most include limited content beyond that mentioned in these lists.
Lightroom 3 Educational Resources
A number of the Lightroom educators have been working overtime to prepare material to coincide with the product launch:
Of course there is plenty of (semi) official content available as well:
Lightroom 3 Plugins
The new Lightroom release has also attracted the attention of the plugin development community:
- Jeffrey Friedl, the king of Lightroom plugin development, has shared the status of his plugin development activities in his Lightroom 3 Plug-in Information post. This includes details of his new Flickr Publish Service.
- I’ve release Snapshotter plugin – my first Lightroom 3 specific plugin
- The Lightroom 3 SDK is now publicly available to developers.
The SDK has added many new capabilities that will keep developers busy for months to come. More on that in a later post.
Getting Lightroom 3
If you are interested in giving the product a try a fully functional 30 day trial is available for download here. Some tips if you want to continue to use the product after the trial period is over:
- If you qualify for the educational version
of Lightroom 3 there are significant savings to be had – as much as 80% off the full price
- Non-US residents should compare prices with other online stores before purchasing at the Adobe online store. Some regions have been reporting that Adobe’s online store pricing is inflated compared to that readily available elsewhere. Australia used to be one of those locations but a quick check confirmed the Adobe store pricing is on par with or slightly cheaper than that available elsewhere online.
- If you have a decent broadband connection and don’t need the physical packaging consider using Adobe’s download delivery method to save a little extra off the asking price. If you used the trial version mentioned above you don’t even need to redownload the software. The registration key will convert it from a trial to full version.
- Support the Lightroom community! If you make use of Lightroom blogs, vodcasts, podcasts or plugins then please consider purchasing via their affiliates. The net cost to you might only be a few extra minutes during the purchase process but it will help support those that produce the content you value! I have included my links below but if these aren’t suitable consider heading over to the Lightroom Blog, The Lightroom Lab or CameraDojo and supporting them instead.
I hope you found these resources useful and enjoy using the latest release of Lightroom as much as I do!