Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

Back in 2009, I reviewed Lightroom 2 - and gave it a fairly glowing review. I spent a fair bit of time evaluating different raw process solutions back then, and Lightroom 2 was the best one out there. A year and a bit later, Adobe has released version 3 of this software tool and it's only gotten better. All of the basics are still the same, so rather than repeating what I've already covered in my review of v2, I thought I'd cover off some of the things that I like the most about Lightroom 3 ($285.99 USD full version, affiliate). Here they are. Read more...

"Windows Vista introduced a modern and extensible imaging framework called Windows Imaging Component (WIC). The operating system comes with built-in support for several common image formats including jpeg, bmp, png, gif, tiff and HD Photo. WIC makes it possible for 3rd parties to add first-class support for image formats to Windows, complete with thumbnails in Explorer, preview and slideshow support in Photo Gallery / Photo Viewer and metadata search integration."

If you take your photos in RAW format to give you more control over the final image once you get home, then you might want to download this free codec pack from FastPictureViewer. It allows you to view the RAW images as thumbnails in windows explorer without having to load them in to a third party application first to view them. This makes it much easier to quickly scan your pictures to find the one you want to edit or display. It also allows you to view the RAW images through other viewers such as Windows Live Photo Gallery and Windows 7 Media Center.

Using Lightroom? I started playing with the 3.0 beta tonight - I'm still using 2.x day to day - and I noticed that in the 3.0 beta they've defaulted to converting to DNG upon import. You can change the default so the raw files are imported, but I found it interesting they've defaulted to DNG. I have virtually no experience with DNG - I always import raw, export to JPEG, then archive my catalog with the files staying in raw format. So I wanted to put this out to any Digital Home Thoughts readers who are using Lightroom. Do you use DNG? If so, why? What are the advantages over keeping your images in raw format?