Adobe Lightroom 3 review

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Verdict:

The powerful lens correction profiles and amazing noise reduction, combined with excellent management make this a tool that all photographers should have.

Review Date: 8 Jun 2010

Price when reviewed: £199

Buy it now for: £40
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Supplier: http://www.amazon.co.uk

Reviewed By: David Ludlow

Our Rating 5 stars out of 5

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There's also a set of manual lens correction controls, which can be handy if you don't have a lens profile yet. However, they also let you adjust perspective problems. These include vertical correction, so that you can make a photo look as though it was taken straight-on, rotate and scale. It's an impressive toolbox, particularly the Vertical correction, which immediately added a new dimension to some of our photos, making our compositions look more interesting.

Some of these transformations can end up causing you to end up with some dead space around your photo, but the Constrain Crop option cuts these bits out automatically. Alternatively, taking the photo into Photoshop CS5 and using its Content-Aware Fill can help keep the original photo's dimensions.

Lightroom is also a great tool for fixing image problems in photos. In addition to the spot removal, red eye, exposure and colour settings that have always been present, Adobe has bumped up its Noise Reduction tool. This is designed to remove all noise from a photo, such as one shot at high ISO settings.

The Noise Reduction sliders lets you adjust for Luminance, Detail, Contrast and Color. The results are phenomenal and even work on JPEG images, so you don't need to have the original RAW files. Our test shot of an Orangutan in a forest, was fairly noisy on close inspection, but after processing all the noise was gone. What's more impressive is that Lightroom 3 preserves the full detail of the original, so the results are just as though you shot the original at a low ISO.