Adobe today released the first free public beta version of Lightroom 4, a software designed for photographers to help them focus on the art and craft of photography. Lightroom 4 is the next major version of Adobe’s solution for photographers and professionals aimed at making it easy to import, adjust and catalogue their images on the desktop.
Lightroom provides photographers with an elegant and efficient way to work with their growing digital image collections, bring out the best in their images, and make an impact from raw capture to creative output, all while maintaining the highest possible quality .
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4 provides a comprehensive set of digital photography tools, powerful simple one-click adjustments and features to cutting edge advanced controls. With Lightroom, you can organize, enhance, and showcase your images all from one fast and light application that’s available for Macintosh and Windows platforms.
Lightroom 4 beta provides a preview of new features and capabilities that will be offered in the final release of Lightroom 4, expected in early 2012. The beta features refined technology for superior shadow and highlight processing, expanded management capabilities including enhanced DSLR video support and the ability to create beautiful photo books from within Lightroom.
Similarly to iPhoto, Lightroom 4.0 now allows users to organize and browse photos by location, thanks to a new Google Maps module.The new Map Module requires an internet connection and uses Google Maps to show satellite, hybrid and other Google Maps views. You can drag and drop images from the film strip onto the map and Lightroom will add the geodata to the image.
New native video support gives photographers the capability to play, trim and extract frames from video clips shot on DSLRs, point-and-shoot cameras and smartphones. Many standard Lightroom image adjustment controls can also be applied to video clips and adjusted videos can be exported as a H.264 file or published directly to Facebook or Flickr. Also Adobe encourages photographers to try the beta release and provide feedback to the product team.
“Giving early customer access to new versions of Lightroom has helped our team deliver an outstanding battle-tested product that really stands up to the demands of photographers worldwide,” said Winston Hendrickson, vice president of Digital Imaging Products, Adobe. “The much anticipated release of Lightroom 4 beta continues this tradition and shows how much Adobe values customer insights into photography workflows.”
Interested users can submit feedback on the community powered feedback site: http://feedback.photoshop.com and users can also connect with the Lightroom team directly on Facebook (www.facebook.com/lightroom), via Twitter (www.twitter.com/lightroom) or on the Adobe Lightroom blog (http://blogs.adobe.com/lightroomjournal).
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.
Download : Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4 BETA [Windows & Mac]
Note : Users can download the beta and use it until the product expires on March 31, 2012.