The Important New Stuff in the Lightroom 4 Beta

Submitted by Syv Ritch on 11. January 2012 - 6:15

It's CES time in Last Vegas and Adobe has announced the Lightroom 4 beta. LR4 is out for the people to test and/or play with it. I haven't played with it yet, just downloaded it. You can too from: https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/entitlement/index.cfm?e=labs_lightroom4 but you first need to register for an Adobe ID.

Here are a few videos released by Adobe.











From a cursory glance, there are many small enhancements over the whole system, but the “big” ones are:

  • New develop process. We had the original, the 2010 and now the updated/enhanced 2012 camera process
  • Fake layers with brushes to make local shadow and highlight adjustments in specific areas, color balance and noise reduction
  • A new book module for making book layouts, with export to at least Blurb
  • Geo-tagging/mapping from within Lightroom
  • “Robust” video support. Exposure, Contrast, Saturation… What about video editing and sound mixing? I don't know
  • Panorama support. LR4 import photos up to 65,000 pixels wide
  • Soft-proofing: i.e. previewing what the print will look like from within Lightroom, no need to use PhotoShop for the soft proofing but still not in the league of qimage.
  • Emailing from within LR4
  • Burning of DVD from within LR4 but only for Windows 64
  • New DNG format v:1.4
  • hundreds of small enhancements/bug fixes