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Documentation for Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 Beta is live.

To use it, choose Help > Lightroom Help (F1) in Lightroom 3 Beta or go to Using Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 Beta.

Here are some of the Lightroom 3 Beta Help topics:

What's new in Lightroom 3 Beta

Importing photos into a catalog

Exporting using Publish Services

Create a copyright watermark

Simulate film grain

Update the process version

Apply a postcrop vignette

Export a video slide show

Custom print packages

Keep in mind that just like the software, this documentation is prerelease. It may be incomplete or contain bugs. We hope to add commenting capabilities soon so you can provide feedback. Meanwhile, you can always share your thoughts at the Lightroom 3 Beta forum.

Enjoy.

I know all the excitement is about the Lightroom 3 Beta right now, but we could still use some help with a survey about Lightroom 2. If you have ever tried to upload photos from Lightroom 2 to an online sharing site, please take a few minutes to complete this survey. We appreciate your help.

I received a simple question via email this morning:

"How do you attach and use plug-ins?"

And I realized that Lightroom Help doesn't provide an answer. Certainly, plug-in developers provide some documentation for their own tools--and by all means, do consult it--but here are some things you should know that will help you work more efficiently with plug-ins in Lightroom:

1. Lightroom 2 can work with export plug-ins regardless of where they're located, but it's easiest if you put them in one of the following folders:

• Mac OS: /Library/Application Support/Adobe/Lightroom/Modules
• Windows XP: C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Adobe\Lightroom\Modules
• Windows Vista: C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Lightroom\Modules

To install a plug-in, simply drag it into one of those folders, and then launch Lightroom. Lightroom will automatically find the plug-in and make it available.

2. Use the Plug-In Manager to enable/disable plug-ins. Choose File > Plug-In Manager or click the Plug-in Manager button in the Export dialog box.

3. To use an export plug-in, click the double-pointing arrow ( ) at the far right of the Files On Disk button that straddles the top of the Export dialog box. Then, choose the plug-in from the list.

4. Some plug-ins have additional functionality that is available by choosing Plug-In Extras from the File, Library, or Help menu.

For more information, see the Export Plug-Ins topic in Lightroom Community Help.

I've recently discovered a couple of "sleeper" topics that customers search in Lightroom Community Help--topics that are frequently searched, yield middling results, and could definitely be better documented.

First: email. Lightroom offers a preset that automates the process of exporting JPEGs that are sized for sending via email: 640 x 480 pixels, sRGB, medium quality, 72ppi. The easiest way to use the preset is to select the photos for export and choose File > Export With Preset > For Email. Specify a location for the exported files, and you're done.

Here's a tutorial with more detail on how to do this on the Mac, including how to use a post-processing action to automatically create the email with the photos attached: Email photos directly from Lightroom (7:07), by Julieanne Kost on Adobe TV. Victoria Bampton has written a similar tutorial, Attach exported files to email (PDF), for Windows and Mac.

All of this is now documented at Exporting photos using presets.

Second: GPS. If your camera records GPS metadata, Lightroom can read the information and display it in an EXIF field in the Metadata panel. If your camera does not support GPS, there are a couple of ways you can get the information into Lightroom. First, you can use a geotagging device to capture GPS coordinates, and then use third-party software to merge that data with the photo before it's imported. Alternatively, you can use Jeffrey Friedl's GPS Support plug-in, which allows Lightroom to read data from a GPS device's track log, or lets you directly "geoencode" a specific location.

Several great tutorials are available with more information about geotagging and Lightroom:

• Lightroom Killer Tips' GPS information video (3:31)
• Geolocation and Lightroom, by Richard Earney
• GPS metadata and linking to Google Earth, by Martin Evening (scroll past the "Extra tips for advanced users" and "Audio file playback" topics to get to the GPS topic)
• A GPS for your digital camera, by Terry White (old, but still accurate)

This, too, is now all documented at View photo metadata.

The default behavior in Lightroom 2 when you press F1 or choose Help > Lightroom Help is to go the Lightroom Help and Support page, a landing page with links to community content and a prominent Community Help search field. While there's a lot of good content on this page, many customers would prefer to go directly to Adobe-written documentation, which is the behavior in CS5 applications. If you would prefer to go directly to the Lightroom documentation when you press F1, you can make that happen by doing the following:

1. Go to Using Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2, the Lightroom online Help landing page.

2. Click the radio button at the bottom of the page: Help on the Web.

Now, when you choose F1 or choose Help > Lightroom Help from inside the application, you'll go directly to Lightroom online Help. You can change the preference again at any time.

And remember, you can always get to Lightroom online Help from the Help and Support page by clicking the big Lightroom Online Help button to the lower-right of the search field.

One final tip: When you're in Lightroom online Help, there's a search field in the upper-right corner of the page. Check This Help System Only when you search to restrict the search to just the Adobe Lightroom documentation. You can always expand the search to Community Help on the results page by deselecting the option Show Only Content From Adobe.