Adobe on Thursday released a public beta of its professional photography workflow application, Lightroom 3. Adobe says the newest version builds on the vision it had for Lightroom — helping photographers focus on the art and craft of photography. The beta is designed to give anyone and everyone a chance to try out the new features and give Adobe feedback on what works and what features may need some more tweaking.

According to the company, new features in Lightroom beta 3 include:

• 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)*

The beta program is open to everyone, so you can go to the Adobe Labs Web site and download the software. Adobe also posted a few videos, as well as opening a resource site with NAPP.