Check out my good friend David Gibbons on his daily internet radio show “In Discussion” on Voice America. His daily program covers a broad range of current topics from world issues to entertainment and the arts. David is a great interviewer and has had a host of notable people as guests. David and I shared an hour together and you can listen to that conversation here if you would like. But tune in when you can with the 100,000+ other listeners that this program has garnered. For an archive of previous programs or a schedule of upcoming ones, check out David’s website at http://www.davidgibbons.org

Well I don’t know about you but I have been anxiously awaiting the release of Lightroom 3. And yesterday my anticipation was satisfied. Adobe released it’s latest version of what is now my main piece of software. While we still use Photoshop extensively, Lightroom has become the hub of ALL of our imagery.

This latest version has a lot of significant improvements and new features and is DEFINITELY worth the upgrade ($99) and frankly I feel it is well worth the new purchase price if you don’t own a previous version. I teach this piece of software in my Art Center College of Design class and thankfully started off the term teaching with the version 3 beta. So now with the full release we can forge ahead with all of the great new tools available!

The main highlights of this new version include:

Superior noise reduction

Accelerated performance

Support for DSLR video files

Image watermarking

Easy image importing

Perspective correction

More flexible print packages

Lens correction

Flickr integration

Easy-to-share slide show videos with music

Tethered shooting

Film grain simulation

Adobe also just recently released CS5 which includes the latest version of Photoshop and has some mind blowing features! With all of this new flexibility it is going to be interesting to see what image production becomes!