Adobe released Photoshop Lightroom 3 to the world, officially ending the beta and hitting stable status.

If you haven’t tried it out yet, you owe it to yourself—Adobe’s made a ton of improvements to Lightroom, and it’s most notably in the brand spanking new raw processor (which is also part of Photoshop CS5). With this release, Adobe has closed in on what were traditionally the front-runners in image quality.

Lightroom 3 gives Capture One a serious run for its money, and in my opinion the new noise reduction algorithms may even surpass C1’s in quality. It’s good stuff so check it out!