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Adobe LR4 Beta Release


Guest WPalank

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Perhaps the Beta but not the complete release.

 

Its getting close to an update time but I think the Beta is still a couple of months off.

 

I hope you are right... I'm looking forward to a few more PP goodies.

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Guest WPalank

Just a little Sherlock Holmes sort of stuff.

 

The National Association of Photoshop Professionals, commonly known as NAPP, has been advertising for over a week that there is a "Big Surprise" that will be announced Jan 10. If you hover your mouse over the image it says "napp_3743_lr4beta-teaser_412x234.jpeg.

 

It seems someone forgot to check their LR naming conventions before posting.

 

Also, it is common knowledge that "The Photoshop Guys" have been testing the software for a while now.

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A quick read of the new features indicates that this is a great release with some superb features for image management.

The book production module, despite not being able to create a non-templated page (this will surely come later?), and direct link to Blurb is a useful and time saving feature.

Soft-proofing ability alone makes the upgrade well worthwhile IMO.

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I played around with the Beta this morning. Looks promising; the new “process” engine (2012) seems to render M9 files more reminiscend to CaptureOne than the 2010 engine did. Skin tones especially lost the (very slight) sickly tint I often ended up with in LR3. But then, this might be due to the test files I used, hence the “seems”. The overall look appears smoother than LR3/process 2010, anyway.

 

The new tonality panel is excellent and makes adjustments much easier for me. I would have to get used to the way the Clarity tool now works; it’s much more aggressive than what I remember. Pulling it all the way down produces a nigh cell-shaded look.

 

Purple fringing correction doesn’t seem to work at all for me which is an issue; one of my favourite lenses is the CV Nokton 50mm which fringes quite a lot depending on light situation. CaptureOne does the much better job here.

 

Noise reduction and input sharpening control remain excellent. Color noise reduction even improved, I think, compared to LR3. Output sharpening remains the same, i.e. three settings per medium type. They work very well I must say; I need lots of fine-tuning in Photoline when trying to come close to what is one simple export option in Lightroom.

 

LR4 is not as responsive as LR3, but I guess that’s due to debug code. The full installation gobbles up almost 1 Gig of space, mostly due to book and Flash gallery templates.

 

All impressions from the Mac version.

 

Cheers,

-Sascha

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I too have downloaded the LR4 beta, it seems to be running without a hitch on my imac. At one time I was a devoted Capture 1 user but over the last few months I have become very comfortable with LR3. With all of these Raw softwares it takes time to become comfortable with what the myriad of sliders do and how they influence each other. I have reached that stage with LR3 and can quickly assess an image and adjust the silders in the basic tab of the develop modules intuitively.

 

Now with LR4 the sllders and what they do and how they interact have all changed, for the better claim Adobe. But now I have to learn them over again because they function differently. It wont be a problem but just take time.

 

They have added some new features, book printing with Blurb of via pdf, soft proofing which is good but I still prefer printing from PS where you have control over sizeing your files for printing.

 

There's good stuff but I feel that Adobe have made sure that most of us will still need PS.

 

Jeff

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