Lightroom 4 Beta

[russellsnr]

Hi, Looked through forums but not seen it mentioned so.
Lightroom 4 Beta is available to DL'd from Adobe and there are also some introduction videos on the site.
Russ

[Kris V]

Played with it a little last night, but I don't think I will buy it immediately when the final version comes out.

[Dizzy]

Unfortunately, the Beta will not operate on XP (I tried). Quite a few are concerned that the
final release of LR4 will be only for OS's after XP.

[Colin Southern]

Quite a few are concerned that the
final release of LR4 will be only for OS's after XP.

In my opinion, they shouldn't be "concerned" -- they should just get with a more modern operating system; XP is VERY long in the tooth now. Admittedly, it's replacement (Vista) has some serious performance / resource management issues, but Windows 7 is absolutely fine in every way, shape, and form -- no reason for folks not to be using it.

[kontrol]

Not much "must have" in LR 4 that will push me to update right away, unless the new feature list I see everywhere is not complete yet.

XP is old indeed, Microsoft also stoped supporting it. Don't expect new application to keep running on it. Win 7 is also faster than XP .

[Colin Southern]

Not much "must have" in LR 4

Ah - more in common than I initially thought with LR3 then

[herbert]

New features that have me interested are:

Soft proofing. Apparently this offers the quick ability to do side by side developments for different printer profiles so you can match your original. It also creates virtual copies for each softproof and labels them with the print profile so you can quickly see them when printing. This seems a lot nicer than my current method of softproofing using duplicate images in Photoshop. Softproofing was one of my reasons to get Photoshop. It has been very useful. However it is clunky. Lightroom may implement it in a much slicker way.

Completely new basic exposure controls. These apparently are much better at highlight and shadow detail. Fill light and recovery are gone. Instead you get something like tone mapping operators for the extremes. Of course this will be in the new Photoshop through ACR.

Improvements to the local adjustment brush. This includes brushing white balance. A lot of my photos shot indoors with variable lighting could benefit from this (mixed tungsten and flourescent lights are the culprits).

Other stuff seems less impressive. Unless you want to make a book album for print. There's a whole new module just for that.

Alex