Adobe Labs has released a new public beta of Lightroom, it's premiere digital darkroom software application designed for both amateur and professional photographers alike, although it's the professional photographers who will get the most out of Lightroom and many of the feature in the beta 3 upgrade.

According to Adobe, a lot of under the hood performance enhancements have been made to improve both responsiveness of the program and speed of the production process. Also added to Lightroom Beta 3 are:

Some of the new features included for you to play with in the Lightroom 3 beta are:

• Brand new performance architecture, building for the future of growing image libraries
• State-of-the-art noise reduction to help you perfect your high ISO shots
• Watermarking tool that helps you customize and protect your images with ease
• Portable sharable slideshows with audio—designed to give you more flexibility and impact on how you choose to share your images, you can now save and export your slideshows as videos and include audio
• Flexible customizable print package creation so your print package layouts are all your own
• Film grain simulation tool for enhancing your images to look as gritty as you want
• New import handling designed to make importing streamlined and easy
• More flexible online publishing options so you can post your images online to certain online photo sharing sites directly from inside Lightroom 3 beta (may require third-party plug-ins)*

Adobe and many other software companies have introduced early planned upgrades to software as public betas so that users can test the program for free and provide the application developers with valuable real time feedback about bugs, suggestions and new features.

If you haven't already you will have to register at the Adobe Labs site: http://labs.adobe.com/, then you will be able to download a Windows or Mac version of the software.