For those having memory leak problems and crashing when using Lightroom 2′s adjustment brushes, this may be the fix.

Adobe Lightroom 2.3

A friend of mine who has contacts with Canon indicated this was a possibility. Personally, I’m not buying it. I don’t see them producing this right now but he says it’s 50/50. It would be a nice prime though, that’s for sure.

Get it while you can. Excellent deal! Normally $299, now $189, full version.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2

[poll id="2"]

Recently, Canon has been releasing lenses that do not contain IS. By now, we all know Canon’s marketing term, “It’s Better In The Lens”. What’s strange about this is that doesn’t mean much if your new lenses don’t have “it”. Is Canon waffling on IS? Is in-body IS the way of the future? It seems Canon can’t make up their mind. Check out our poll concerning this issue.

There’s a rumor over on DPreview indicatiing Canon will be releasing a 17-40L this year but withought IS. Very strange!

Adobe did a great job fixing the output artifact problems in Lightroom.  Exporting your image while resizing now looks like it should.

(3 votes, average: 4.67 out of 5)
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Supposedly this fixes the output resizing bugs. We will be testing shortly.

(3 votes, average: 3.33 out of 5)

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Rumor has it that Canon is working on a replacement for the 17-85 IS due this spring. Of course, always take this kind of unsourced information with a grain of salt.

I recently picked up a copy of Lightroom 2 thanks to the new Beta profiles which put the image quality just about on par with Canon’s DPP. This combined with the neat workflow tools and the exceptional RAW level image manipulaton made LR2 too tempting to resist. However, recent exploration of the program has found an early problem. So far, it seems that the resizing of images out of development mode suffer from a poor quality resizing mechanism, leaving your images full of ugly artifacts. In fact, the well received *free* Faststone resizer handily beats down the $300 Lightroom 2 in resizing! Strange, but true. Below are the examples to prove it.

These images all had the exact same settings coming out of Lightroom 2. All were resized to 900×600 with no output sharpening, except for the images that went to Faststone resizer. These were exported from Lightroom 2 full size jpeg and resized to 900×600 in Faststone resizer using their highest quality algorithm. Please click the images for the full size view.

It’s very clear in this image how much more smooth the Faststone hawk is. Note how the head and feathers in the Lightroom 2 version look more rough, like a cheap digital camera.

Another example, this time using a forest scene. Same settings, same methods:

Notice how awful the trees look in the Lightroom 2 resize. There is something very wrong with the resizing algorithm in Lightroom 2. You can sometimes see these poor quality artifacts in the develop previews inside the program itself, especially on non full screen images.

If the free Faststone resizer can get it right, why can’t a $300 professional image program like Lightroom 2? There are many more examples of these sorts of artifiacts in LR2 resizing. At this point I can only recommend you use Faststone for your resizing needs. LR2 simply doesn’t cut it.

You can check out Faststone for yourself here.

Interesting stats from lensrental on their repair issues. I’d conclude that this is a pretty respectable resource.

Link

The 17-55 IS EFS, 10-22 EFS, and the 100-400 IS L appear to be the most problematic. The 17-55 IS EFS seems to especially garner quality control complaints by users on forums.

on the other hand, it looks like there are some serious issues with Sigma as well, which can be read at this link:

Link