Lightroom beta 3 is out, woohoo! I'd been hoping for an update for some time. Beta 3 looks really good... I happened to do a shoot of the boys last night (getting lights set up for another shoot), so I had some images to import and process. I always import off the CF card using iView MediaPro for cataloging purposes, so I didn't get to see any improvements in CF import, but everything in Lightroom went smoothly. The UI is a bit improved, I think; things have gotten a little crisper. It definitely seems snappier on my 1.25GHz Powerbook G4 than beta 2 did, and it's better about telling me when it's working on something.
There's a web module now (see sample gallery links below), separate from slideshows (which is muy good), and the default options turn out a decent HTML gallery. There's a nice concept of "index" and "small view" (larger selected photo plus index) and "large view" (larger still selected photo only). The design needs some tweaking, particularly the links (e.g. prev/next). They should be arrows or something, not run-together words. But the index mouse-overs are great, they look just like mousing over an image in Lightroom's gallery view. The identity plate is annoyingly large and has borders that are just too spacious, but it can be turned off. It would be nice to adjust the layout so that the plate isn't owning all the horizontal space up at the top, e.g. aligning all of the other text with the bottom of the plate, but on the right.
The flash gallery looks nice but the images are washed out. They look like they haven't been converted to sRGB, even though they are sporting sRGB profiles. Either that or the flash renderer fails to handle profiles correctly. Something's not right, but it could be that I forgot to check some box (like the "do the right thing" box). But given that Lightroom should just manage color correctly and not bother me about it, it's a little disappointing.
Memory usage over time seems to be improved... beta 2 would eat everything I had and then some and the rest of my apps and the OS would be chunking away in swap. With beta 3, I processed about 40 images and then let it sit overnight and then did some more work this morning and my other apps were still usable.
I made one slideshow in the slideshow module, which was great, but exporting it was weird... almost like that just wasn't finished it all. The export dialog has no format option selected when it appears, and if you leave it that way, it exports to flash... but if you go to choose an option, the only one is PDF. That and the flash export never finished.
So it's still a beta (surprise!), but very usable for image processing IMO. Lightroom is really only a processor for me, anyway. It's where photos go from raw RAW to finished. Once finished, I'm usually exporting them via some other means (e.g. iView MediaPro for web galleries). I would love it if Lightroom would surpass MediaPro for web export, but it seems like there's a long way to go. Maybe if templates can easily be created.
So that's my "12 hours with Lightroom beta 3". It's good.
