I was checking out the G-Tech booth (more on this soon) at a CES press event last night when a girl from Adobe walked up to me and said I might want to walk around the corner to Adobe’s booth because they just announced Lightroom 4 beta. Woohoo!
I spent awhile talking to the Adobe folks about Lightroom 4 and going through the new features. A few things really stand out…
Limited video editing is now possible in Lightroom. You’re limited to which adjustments you can make in color grading. You can trim heads and tails of your clips.
You can export a couple different formats, including H.264, which makes LR4 acceptable for casual sharing. However, when you export, you are rendering a separate copy, so when you open it in Premiere Pro, you can’t undo any effects or trimming. There’s no also support for “Send to Premiere” in a similar fashion of the tight Photoshop integration. The edits within Lightroom 4, however, remain non-destructive so you can go back and make changes at will.
There are new adjustments for shadows and highlights that are offer more powerful recovery than in LR3. Moire correction is another new one. You can make local WB and tint adjustments for mixed lighting situations. Cool stuff.
There are two new modules for Books (photo books) and Maps. We didn’t get in depth with this; however, the Books allows you to create a photo book and upload it to Blurb when you’re done.
You can download the LR4 beta on Adobe’s website for free. Just remember, this isn’t guaranteed for prime time and these early beta versions have been a little buggy at times.
All of this is very nice. I don’t think Adobe Lightroom should have included video editing. Let’s keep lightroom as a photo program.
Also missing was a update that made it possible to disort picture (in the crop tool). Now that would have been useful.
Agreed! Lightroom shouldn’t be loosing it’s focus with all these new video editing features. I’m a photographer and filmmaker; I use Lightroom for photography and I use Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5 for video editing. Period. et’s stay with what programs do best.
I think at the very least if someone needs video editing that they try the entry level Adobe Premiere Elements.
What I would like to see is the “content aware” healing feature from Photoshop CS5 brought into Lightroom. And further, at Adobe MAX 2011 they announced that ground breaking “Image Deblurring” feature where an image that is blurry can be made to be sharp and in focus with an algorithm they developed. It will no doubt make it into Photoshop CS6 or 6.5. They’d be awesome to see in Lightroom 4.x
Of course Lightroom needed to add video features, tons of people shoot videos now that video features are ubiquitous on newer cameras. Competing software like Aperture already handles videos, it’s a useful feature for MANY people, and it doesn’t hurt any of the photography related features. It’s kind of like saying Photoshop already handles photos, so why do we need Lightroom? Kudos to Adobe.
More importantly, the largest and most important changes have nothing to do with video. Every single feature I wanted to see in LR4 made it in. We have softproofing, expanded printing capabilities, upgraded tethered shooting features, more powerful adjustment brushes, AND a significantly more powerful develop module with adaptive tonal controls.