Lightroom's core purpose has always been to provide tools for sorting, organizing, developing, and publishing photos, but version 3 upgrades Lightroom's flexibility with its new noise reduction engine and improved RAW processing, as well as the streamlined workflow.

Importing images into Lightroom 3 is simpler, which makes finding and defining your source and destination easier. For instance, the import interface reveals all attached drives but grays out all previously imported files, to avoid duplication. Once you've defined your naming convention for imports, the type of import, file handling, metadata, and other options, you can save an import preset (or several different presets) for future use with a couple of clicks. A compact view of import implements your presets and gives you control over editing metadata, keywords, and type of import. Unfortunately, the import interface ignores folder structures on CF and SD cards, so we had to waste time creating filters to define groups of photos and then import each group individually.

Lightroom now has direct support for tethered image capture for Nikon and Canon cameras, so you don't need to use the camera's own software--a useful option for studio photographers.

Once you've loaded your images into Lightroom, you can begin your core operations in the Develop module. The Develop module's most obvious change in Lightroom 3 is the direct access it gives you to all collections and recent folders; in the past, you had to go back and forth between the Develop module and the Library module. The bigger news, though, lies in how the module processes RAW files. Specifically, Adobe has rewritten the tool's demosaicing, sharpening, noise reduction, and vignetting algorithms; and you can now add filmlike grain to your pictures. In our tests, the resulting improvements were more obvious in some photos than in others--as you'd expect. But the noise reduction enhancement is very welcome, offering more-precise controls for reducing or eliminating noise while retaining more detail. For those image files previously processed in Lightroom 2.5, version 3 introduces versioning: You can choose to apply the new noise algorithms or use your old edits.

Incidentally, and Lightroom now use the same RAW processing algorithms, so you can retain in either program any editing that you do in the other.