Great as this is, it's not the only task this tool can do. By going into the Manual tab, you will have the ability to not only adjust distortion, but also the vertical and horizontal perspective of your photographs. This means that you can make minor changes to your composition and perspective even after you have taken the picture!
A useful tool that has been updated is the Lens Vignetting tool. Whereas in the past we could just apply either a regular or post-crop vignette over our image, we now have options to control the Feather, Roundness, Highlights, and even the Style of the vignette. Being that this is such a popular effect that photographers use, these are useful options for a creative arsenal.
You can publish your photos directly to your Flickr Photostream with the Lightroom Publishing manager!
One of the most important elements to a photographer is the ability to have your work seen. In today's world, Flickr is used by most photographers, professional and amateurs alike. In a brilliant and time saving addition, Lightroom can link to your Flickr account so you can automatically publish to your Photostream without having to log in to your account! In addition, Lightroom will show comments others leave on your photos!
Another wonderful feature that Lightroom has is the ability to automatically generate a slideshow that can be exported as an MP4 video file. You can select music, determine the length of each photo, the length of the video, choose different backgrounds, apply watermarks, and many other features. You also have the ability to export your pictures as a series of PDFs if you needed to produce a Power Point presentation. What used to take hours in an editing timeline can now be done in a matter of minutes in the Slideshow Module of Lightroom 3!
Many of these changes in Lightroom are possible because of all the work that Adobe did "under the hood" of this program. Preexisting algorithms that were used in previous versions of Lr were updated and, thankfully, we can apply this new technology to our old libraries of images. Lightroom can automatically locate these images and can use the updated algorithms for preexisting effects by just clicking a button. This means that if you are a long time Lightroom user, you can have Lightroom update the effects you have applied to your older pictures so they can have the benefit of the new technology.
The Slideshow Module provides great options for easily exporting professional looking slideshows on the fly.
Performance
A stunning improvement to Lr3 is the changes made to Noise Reduction. This is one of the tools that will always be made better with each release, but I feel that the Lightroom team has really outdone themselves this time. First of all, they should change the name of the tool to Noise Elimination because that's essentially what this tool does. Like everything else in the program its simplicity consists of a few sliders. In addition to the Luminance and Color sliders, there are sliders for Contrast and Detail so your images don't look too soft or sterile.
