How full-featured is Lightroom 3 beta 2

[Rajah Sulayman]

I remember hearing that beta 1 had a few of its features disabled for some reason or other, and that a lot of them were now active in beta 2. Is that all of them, or are there features that are still disabled? I'm thinking of installing beta 2 on my new field laptop and playing with it on my upcoming trip, but not if it's hobbled.

[TolyD]

Lightroom 3 beat v. is out, you should try that instead of 2.

[Rajah Sulayman]

Beta who? All I can find on Adobe.Com is beta 2.

Adobe Labs - Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3

[Nicole]

They did re-enable some of the features that were disabled in Beta 1. I know they re-enabled the noise reduction sliders, and they added some extra grain features. Oh, here are the main ones (from here):

• Improved performance throughout the application for faster importing and loading of images
• Native tethered shooting support for select Nikon and Canon DSLR cameras
• Luminance noise reduction has been added to the previous color noise reduction improvements available in the first public beta for outstanding overall high ISO quality
• Support for importing and managing video files from DSLR cameras for better overall photographic workflow control
• Improvements to the import experience in the first beta to reflect public feedback
• Improved watermarking functionality from the first beta to reflect public feedback

I didn't realise they'd enabled the ability to deal with video now (yay!), but I tried out the tethering, worked well. Overall, I haven't actually found anything disabled that I've needed, and well, since I don't know what else (if there's anything else) planned for the final release, I'd say it's reasonably full featured.

[Rajah Sulayman]

Good to know. I may just stick to Lightroom 2 to be sure, because there's still no release date for Lightroom 3, and once I get back from my trip I'll be moving all my photos over to my main workstation and I'm not sure how well the LR3 dng raws will play with LR2. Better safe than sorry.

Even though I really really wanna play with LR3.

[Nicole]

Definitely better safe than sorry. I just haven't been able to go back to LR2 after using LR3 and the new export features. That has to be my fav part of it.