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!