What’s New in Lightroom 4 (Public Beta)?

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0F_5oG1euA

 

In this episode of the Adobe Creative Suite Podcast I'll give you a walkthrough of the top new features of Lightroom 4 Public Beta! 

Here are some of the top level features of Lightroom 4:

• Robust Video Support
• Manage images by location with the Map Module
• Simplified Basic Adjustments
• Powerful new Shadow & Highlight controls
• Additional local adjustments including Noise Reduction and White Balance
• Soft Proofing Reinvented
• Elegant Photo Book creation
• Email from directly within Lightroom
• Publish videos directly to Facebook or Flickr
• Enhanced DNG workflows
• Adobe Revel (Carousel) export workflow

Download the Public Beta of Lightroom 4 here.

More in-depth info here.

Join Lightroom Product Manager Tom Hogarty for some LIVE Webcasts over at Kelby Training – Schedule Here.

Also check out the Kelby Training Lightroom 4 Learning Center for more videos and Matt's Lightroom Killer Tips Blog.

Get Geotag Photos Pro to take Advantage of the Lightroom 4 Map Module with Any Camera

During my Video above I show the NEW Map Module. While it's great to have a GPS attached/built-in directly to your camera or occasionally take smartphone pics to use as reference, it may be more convenient to use GPS Data Logger and then merge the GPX Log File in Lightroom after your shoot. Here's a cool one for iOS:

 

iTunes

 

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See more of my Adobe Creative Suite Videos on my Adobe Creative Suite Podcast and get the App here. It features EXCLUSIVE CONTENT that no one else gets to see. This episode has a BONUS CLIP that is available only in the App! My iOS App is a Universal App for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. I also have an Android version:

Learn Adobe Creative Suite with Terry White - Wizzard Media

 

 

48 Replies to “What’s New in Lightroom 4 (Public Beta)?”

  1. So… let me get this straight. We are at the 4.0 release. We are in 2012. And Lightroom 4.0 doesn’t mention one thing about collaboration or network support. Is this insane? Truly insane? This is something I have been looking for since 2.0.

      1. Are you saying that Lightroom should wait for the competition to get features and add them in? I have a PC with a ton of hard drive space. I have a laptop that doesn’t. Why can’t the catalog be hosted on the PC and laptop use it, too? What about maintaining a single catalog that is applied to the image hosted elsewhere? Network aware computing is the norm for most programs I use.

        It seems crazy, to not have it by a 4.0 release. I’d also happily give up a lot of the new features for this one to be added.

        1. There are plenty of great options today for multiple machine access. I use Dropbox a lot for smaller catalogs when I’m traveling. You can also use a NAS drive and have that drive mounted on both your PC and Laptop. This isn’t a big deal. The other option of having multiple users/machines accessing the same catalog at the same time is NOT going to happen.

        2. well it is not top priority because most people dont need it. otherwise it would be top priority.. simple as that.

    1. Do you realize how much work and effort it would take to add multi-user support to LR. It is a huge task not to mention the testing involved. I’m sure that the costs far outweigh the benefits on this one. I suspect that for the Adobe team to add this support, they probably would have needed to sacrifice over 50% of the new features added to LR4. And I just don’t think a lot of folks really need this. Also, don’t forget that a lot of the developers on the LR team are more photog experts than database specialists.

  2. Thanks for the heads up Terry, this is great news as I have just ordered my new GPS tracker for my Nikon last week. Now with the new Lightroom I can use the Map Module to see where things were taken. 2012 is shaping up to be a huge year for photography!

  3. Terry – Thanks for the great and helpful tutorial as usual. I am definitely looking forward to downloading Lightroom 4 to play around a bit!!

  4. New engine looks nice.

    But…
    Still no network capability
    Still no face recognition to ease keywording
    No word on video card utilization/acceleration

    Really, this is v4?

  5. i think the GPS features are a nice start… but far from good.
    they are way too basic and cumbersome.
    not enough for people who do real geotagging.

    like ACDSEE it´s only a half a$$ approach.

    and im pretty sure it will not change much for the final.
    i can only hope that they will do major improvements of the GPS feature in future versions. they have to improve it a lot to make it really usefull.

    for example the MAP feature does NOT help you in keywording or other metadata editing. its just for placing GPS coordinates. 🙁

    adobe should have a look at this FREE tool:

    http://www.geosetter.de/

    1. Just curious which specific features would you like to see in the new GPS/Mapping support. Personally, the keyword/metatada integration is nice, but not critical. And one can easily write plug-ins to read GPS coordinates and update various meta fields if that is your desire. I suspect there are already ones out there.

      1. but why have other to write plugins for such fundamental features? 🙂

        when i geotag an image i expect that the metadata for city etc. are automatically filled in or that im asked if i want to fill in the data automatically.

        as for other features…. just have a look at GEOSETTER it´s INCREDIBLE!!!

        one feature i like to see is angle of view and viewing direction. usefull for landscape shooters like me.

        or export to PANORAMIO would be fantastic.

  6. GPS support and geotagging i have waited for that… but what a dissapointment.

    could adobe have made it more basic?… no!

    the functionallity is so basic every freeware geotagging tool is way better.
    it does not even put the metadata in the fields for city etc. when you have geotagged an image.
    what the fuk they are thinking?

    http://www.geosetter.de

    geosetter is a ONE MAN project.
    and adobe with all it´s manpower has nothing more to offer then this crappy MAP feature in LR4?

    useless….

    ok ok it´s beta …. but i doubt they will improve the map modul significantly in the final.

    will check out if the develop modul improvements are worth an upgrade for me….

  7. The engine improving is very good and the changes in develop module are awesome. But, map and books are better in iPhoto which is 20 times cheaper than LR. I hope to see LR in the Mac App Store.

  8. Hey terry, In the video of your photo shoot, what cart is that that you keep your laptop and external monitor on? I have been researching a good cart for my studio….Thanks.

  9. Thanks for the great video Terry. I think I found a bug, but the site to submit bugs doesn’t seem to work for lightroom. When choosing original for the video export type, your quick develop adjustments as well as your trims are ignored. This is a pretty serious problem.

    Other than that, great release its shaping up to be. I hope they have an iPad app up there sleeves to control the lightroom sliders with.

    1. I agree. With all the great new video features, how could they have forgotten these two essentials:

      – Ability to rotate video
      – Ability to adjust capture time (i.e., date created/modified)

      I use 3rd party utilities and Picasa for these minor adjustments but it would be nice to see in the final LR4 release.

  10. I love all the improvements that I’ve seen from the different Adobe supporters.
    The one thing i have not seen that I think is a small but critical improvement is in the adjustment brush. Adobe has done an awesome job at making improvements to that feature with now including the basic panel controls as adjustments you can make. However, have you ever noticed when in auto mask mode the brush just doesn’t quite get all the way to the edge pixels outside the selected area? I think if Adobe can some how put 3 check boxes that allow the brush to feather while in auto mask mode ( 1 box for none, 1 box for 1px, and 1 box for 2px ) so that way the brush could do an even better job at auto mask by blending the area adjusted with the area not adjusted. I’m sure you get this Terry, but I’ll put it this way, in PS when you make a selection its a hard seletion, but if you just feather it 1 or 2 px and then paint or clone lets say it blends in better with the non selected area. That is what I would like to see in the final release and it would something everyone would benefit from.

    Ron

  11. Terry,

    Thanks for the great intro to Lightroom 4. While we are working with the beta, we should assume that changes we make to images in the develop module will not easily be transferable to the corresponding images when we get the release version of Lightroom 4, correct?

    Stan

  12. Hey Terry,
    When you were in the export window. and you pulled down the export to and selected email. I saw CD/DVD is that an actual burn engine that will export and burn images to a disk? If so that is a highlight feature in my opinion. Something I hear asked for all the time.

  13. Don Temple says:
    January 12, 2012 at 3:41 pm I’ve purchased Lightroom since version 1 but I guess version 3.6 will be the last. Let’s forget for the moment the new hardware costs involved. I’m running XP and have NO plans to move to Windows 7 and especially VISTA because of older devices (HP laser printers, software I’ve updated online and no CD, etc. Thanks for cutting me off at the knees by not allowing XP users to take advantages of improvements in any future software. I hope you don’t do the same with CS6!!

  14. What about the new white balance improvements. To be frank books & global positioning do not interest me!!!!!!!!!!!

Comments are closed.