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This is the point in my reviews of Lightroom 1 and 2 that I stopped being nice to Adobe. Lightroom 2 was so frustrating because, despite all the wonderful tools for croppping and local adjustments, it’s RAW output, especially from Canon RAW files wasn’t that good, but we now reach the biggest change from Lightroom 2 to Lightroom 3 - The RAW processing.
Like many pros, although all the adjustment tools in Lightroom 1 and 2 were great, I rarely used Lightroom because the end results just weren’t good enough. After having to re-process complete jobs in Capture One, I pretty much gave up on Lightroom. Fortunately someone at Adobe - Thank-you, whoever you are - realised this and decided that both Lightroom and Photoshop needed to take RAW processing, noise reduction and Canon much more seriously. The result was a ground up rebuild of what powers RAW processing in Adobe Lightroom, Photoshop and Photoshop Elements: Adobe Camera RAW or ACR to it’s friends. The result, ACR 6 is not just a step up for Adobe, but for RAW processing in general. During Lightroom 3’s beta testing stage Adobe produced a version with only the color noise reduction enabled, because here is where they feel they’ve made most progress. Color noise, or random color splodges, is actually much more of a problem than luminance, or grain like noise. Grain was always a feature of faster films and at times can look quite attractive. Colored splodges don’t ever really have that effect. They’re pretty much horrible all the time. If you look at the 100% test crops below you’ll see what I mean. These clips are from the same frame / same camera.
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