Lightroom 4 Beta Announced - First Impressions

Mark Wilson's first impressions of the just-announced Lightroom 4 beta are in this blog - http://www.wildphotofo​rum.com …8-adobe-lightroom-4-beta/

Personally, I love the changes to the Basic panel in Develop and the additional options now available via local adjustments and I know lots of you will be pleased to see that soft proofing is in.

http://labs.adobe.com/​technologies/lightroom​4/

Download it from the above link

Here's the Adobe resources list: http://blogs.adobe.com …oom-4-beta-resources.html

Wow, some sweet stuff in there! I guess I'll need to download it!

I may have to give it a whirl too. I'm still on version 2.7, so I'm interested to see how much the processing has improved.

The shadow/highlights feature is something sorely needed. The fill light slider was useless in my opinion. I wonder if all this stuff will make it to the next release of ACR? Probably it will be denied to PS CS5 users and bundled with PS CS6 as a tactic to force people to buy it (especially when new cameras are released).

downloading >.>

I have always wanted a white balance brush!

Sadly I'll have to wait until tomorrow or Wed to try it out since my computer is getting a new logic board.

With a moire slider, we no longer need low pass filters in our cameras. Anyone tested this function out yet?

Well, the not-so-good news, for some of us at least, is that XP is no longer supported. For Windows, Vista and Win7 only. I won't be able to use it on my workstation unless I get it upgraded, which means I could play with the Beta on my laptop, but I won't do the actual upgrade until I upgrade my PC.

Other than that, there is a lot of good stuff in there! The improvements on the controls and process version sound pretty sweet, and then the Noise Reduction local brush, the RGB curve and the Soft Proofing, all more than just "window dressing"!

Anyway, at this point I can't get to my laptop...dang.

Can a local selection be inversed... I hope so

I haven't seen anything like that -- I assume you are talking about brush/gradient effects?

They don't work like Photoshop selections, so I don't see the sense of it -- what would you be inverting?

tonylong wrote in post #13677969
I haven't seen anything like that -- I assume you are talking about brush/gradient effects?

Yep... I mean painting on a subject (say, a person) then inversing the selection to allow e.g. softening the background

Well, that doesn't seem to be a concept -- we're stuck with the "old fashioned" way of brushing in Softening, although now we'll be able to brush in Noise Reduction as well, which will allow us to apply that without over-softening, which could be a good thing!