[Leica] Lightroom3

[kanner at acm.org (Herbert Kanner)]

For over a year, I had been using LR2 because it wouldn't run on OS X 
(Tiger), and I wasn't about to enrich Apple with $129 for an OS 
upgrade. When Fry's suddenly offered it for $29 I installed Snow 
Leopard, fought with the things that stopped working, like printers, 
until I understood how Apple had reorganized stuff. Then, yesterday, 
I installed the LR upgrade.

So, it would be interesting to know what the major changes are. Most 
things look pretty much the same. I understand they claim that they 
have improved the noise reduction, but it is so pathetic compared to 
what NoiseNinja will do in its most simple-minded automatic mode that 
I would not even bother with the LR noise reduction facility.

Interesting point about NoiseNinja. They provide a chart which can be 
photographed with various cameras at various ISO values, the idea 
being that you create noise profiles from those photographs and then 
use them to reduce noise in subsequent photos. Well, I tried it, and 
to my surprise found that the dumb simple way of using it produced 
better results.

The simplest way is to go full automatic. The software finds a number 
of uniform areas in the picture, samples them, and then produces a 
profile for THAT picture which is then used to remove noise. It does 
show you what spots it is sampling. It can be fooled if some area 
with uniform microscopic detail looks like noise. I found one photo 
where the automatic procedure did not work. In that case, one has the 
option of manually selecting small areas in the picture that should 
look uniform, drawing little sampling rectangles just as if one were 
cropping out tiny areas. I.e., you're telling the software where 
sample the noise.

One drawback is that it produces .tiff files that are over 100 MB in 
size. They can be cut back with what I think is loss-less 
compression, but that becomes an extra step.

Can anyone summarize for me what other goodies besides backing up at 
a SANE time differentiate LR3 from LR2?

Herb
-- 
Herbert Kanner
kanner at acm.org
650-326-8204

Do not meddle in the affairs of cats,
for they are subtle and will pee
on your computer!