Lightroom--Vive l'difference

I have had the Lightroom 3 Beta download on my computer for about 3 months now. It intimidated the hell out of me so I never really did much. Then I took this picture the other day:

Looks pretty cool, right? I used Picasa and hit "I'm feeling lucky" on a close up of a rainbow that passed through the other day. I was excited that I could see the rain falling through the colors and that you could see the extra bands of coloring under the traditional ROYGBIV.

HOWEVER you will also notice that it is noisy as heck. "Noise" is the graininess you can see, the little dots of brighter colors that make it look kind of like a close up of a cartoon in the newspaper. Not pretty. If you are picky about your photos like I am, this will bother you no matter how cool it looks!!!

Lightroom (from Adobe) has this cool feature called Noise Reduction. I had heard about it but was too scared to figure it out. Never be scared of a computer program in this day and age. There are so many help files and tutorials out there that anyone can do anything if they just take the time to read the how to!!!

Here is the same photo using noise reduction:

I was very happy with this result. There are still some issues that cannot be completely resolved using just the noise reduction, but it looks many times better and preserved the 2 things I liked about the image in the first place: the rain drops and all the colors!

Lightroom 3 is now available to purchase so the beta is no longer available. I am not sure if at some point its going to die on me completely, but the good thing about software is that they are always working on the next version and that one will be in beta also! Visit the Adobe website to purchase this wonderful program! If you have a student at home, the cost is drastically reduced so check that out for sure!!