Lightroom 4 Beta now available

[corpusrex]

Not sure if people have seen this. Lightroom 4 is now in open beta.

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/lightroom4/

Some interesting new additions in there.

New Features in Lightroom 4 Beta
Highlight and shadow recovery brings out all the detail that your camera captures in dark shadows and bright highlights.

Photo book creation with easy-to-use elegant templates.

Location-based organization lets you find and group images by location, assign locations to images, and display data from GPS-enabled cameras.

White balance brush to refine and adjust white balance in specific areas of your images.

Additional local editing controls let you adjust noise reduction and remove moiré in targeted areas of your images.

Extended video support for organizing, viewing, and making adjustments and edits to video clips.

Easy video publishing lets you edit and share video clips on Facebook and Flickr®.

Soft proofing to preview how an image will look when printed with color-managed printers.

Email directly from Lightroom using the email account of your choice.

 

[alipaulphotography]

Just downloading it now. I have been waiting for this for quite a while now!

 

[Crapking]

Currently using combo of Aperture and Photoshop 5 on multiple computers (with multiple copies all over the place , and hoping to get more organized soon. Is it worth my consolidating all my keepers into this new LR ? Is the transition easy? Will it move (or copy) my originals as they are imported?

 

[Mendolera]

Very cool. I got LR3 at student price and it makes such a huge difference in workflow... Before I got it I figured it was a good editing software but didnt realize the power of handling RAW and exporting those files so quickly. I def will give LR4 a look..

 

[JR]

Currently using combo of Aperture and Photoshop 5 on multiple computers (with multiple copies all over the place , and hoping to get more organized soon. Is it worth my consolidating all my keepers into this new LR ? Is the transition easy? Will it move (or copy) my originals as they are imported?

You should be able to import all your photos fairly easily in Lightroom. What I first suggest before you change your setup is first download the trial version of LR (even if it is the LR3 version) and try importing all your photos into it so you can play with it and get familiar with its library capabilities. I dont use Aperture myself but I love how LR and PS work well together.

Lightroom will be able to import preatty much any RAW file format you have or JPEG. The trial verison is for 30 days...enought for you to judge...

 

[alipaulphotography]

Yeah easy to transport everything from aperture. Can even tell lightroom to organise it all for you by date.

The beta isn't as 'new' as I was hoping. Hoping they stick in the ability to edit grain in the shadows/midtones/highlights or i'll be pretty miffed. The new exposure editing section is pretty good though. Really helps to nail a skin tone.

New brush section is greatly expanded too which is a welcome addition. Other than that - seems much the same for the 'develop' section.

 

[7enderbender]

Currently using combo of Aperture and Photoshop 5 on multiple computers (with multiple copies all over the place , and hoping to get more organized soon. Is it worth my consolidating all my keepers into this new LR ? Is the transition easy? Will it move (or copy) my originals as they are imported?

Not sure if this is a simple yes/no question. I guess you have to try it. I personally find Lightroom especially weak at what its core functionality is supposed to be: organizing things.

Especially when using more than one computer I find stuff to get all over the place quickly since Lightroom manages the edits as a virtual catalog. If you have all your photos in one place, say a network drive that you access from all computers, it may be easier - you "just" need to make sure to always synchronize the virtual catalogs then. Since you are talking about "keepers" it sounds as if your workflow may be more like mine in which you prefer an actual finished result and not a virtual version in some LR catalog.

I only bought Lightroom 3 because I could get it cheap for about $100. That's about what I find it's worth. I'm not going to spend more money to upgrade and none of the new features sound interesting to me.

LR is great for a quick fix of things or if you do some basic edits to a batch of photos. Also some of the export to web functions are ok (not great, but ok). Some of its presets are great to try out different styles and ideas quickly.

Generally speaking, I'm still more comfortable with using Photoshop and then save a final result to an "edits" folder together with the originals and then back that up and sync it to my other locations. Yes, that does eat even more memory but what the heck. In the grand scheme of things the occasional new hard drive isn't really the problem.

 

[Crapking]

That is my real question, the ease of managing the original RAW and the 'edited' JPG (which the keepers get posted to the web) and then later, maybe get printed / enlarged, whatever. I find myself struggling with the colorspace issue / print profile of the different versions. As I understand and develop my Photoshop workflow, I've learned to create project folders with subfolders for RAW/JPGs, but was curious the 'power' of LR to go back to help my old JPGs (pre RAW era) and more importantly moving forward, how to optimize workflow with new projects.

When LR imports RAW from the CF card, and then PS does the edits, where do the edits/original go?? are people happy with file management issues, I am happy using PS for my edits, but before adding another file management scheme (LR), I'd like to know if current users are happy

 

[Chewy734]

wait... you can import from Aperture to LR3 easily? Does that include importing all the adjustments for all the photos in Aperture?

The reason I ask is because I have a large Aperture library, and since spring of 2011 I switched to LR3 and started with a new library. I would like to merge so I don't have to keep Aperture installed on my Mac, but I wasn't able to find an easy way to do that back then. Thanks!

 

[EYEONE]

I love the video addition if it will allow me to easily make cuts, combinations and color corrections.

And I've been wanting a noise reduction brush for a long time!

 

[nikkito]

Does it have rgb curves like photoshop? Thats all I want

 

[Canon-F1]

Given that some features never made it into LR 3.0 beta that were in the final release of LR 3.0, I wonder what will be in the final release of LR 4.0 that are not in LR 4.0 beta?

sorry my glas orb is kaputt.

 

[Gothmoth]

i agree the geotagging support is lousy.

 

[Peerke]

No Windos XP support :-X. OMG, just when they made some great changes.

 

[Canon-F1]

No Windos XP support :-X. OMG, just when they made some great changes.

time to move on.

i mean.. what do you want with only 2GB RAM for applications in 2012 anyway.

and LR eats RAM....

 

[contrastny]

Has there been any additions to Lightroom 4 that help you correct flicker in time lapses?

 

[Canon-F1]

Has there been any additions to Lightroom 4 that help you correct flicker in time lapses?

well that is something you do in a video application.

there is also no multiband audio editing for video clips in LR.

 

[contrastny]

Has there been any additions to Lightroom 4 that help you correct flicker in time lapses?

well that is something you do in a video application.

there is also no multiband audio editing for video clips in LR.

I Deflicker my time lapses prior to video. I've been using "LR Time Lapse" to Deflicker since you can make the adjustments to your RAW images; pre-processing on a RAW file basis rather than post processing video.

I was hoping to see more options for time lapses in lightroom 4.

 

[Canon-F1]

I Deflicker my time lapses prior to video. I've been using "LR Time Lapse" to Deflicker since you can make the adjustments to your RAW images; pre-processing on a RAW file basis rather than post processing video.

isn´t that awfull slow?
but maybe worth it when you output to HD (but i doubt that).

i don´t do much TL anymore.. i used this:

http://www.granitebaysoftware.com/Products/ProductGBD.aspx

 

[alipaulphotography]

Does it have rgb curves like photoshop? Thats all I want

Yes! It does!

This is a really good video summarising the new features in the develop area.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeieHtruelU&feature=g-u&context=G269593aFUAAAAAAABAA

I'm sure there will be a lot more tools we'll find out about as time goes on.

It isn't a downgrade that is for sure.