Amidst the deluge of camera announcements at CES comes photo news of a different sort. Adobe has made public a beta of Lightroom 4, the next version of its photo cataloging and processing suite.
At first look, almost nothing has changed, but dig deeper and v4.0 might be the biggest upgrade yet.
For full and almost ridiculously in-depth coverage of the new beta, head over to DP Review's excellent six-page extravaganza. For a quick overview of the highlights, stick around.
The first thing you'll notice is the addition of a couple of new modules: maps and books. Maps shows your geo-tagged photos on, you guessed it, a map, and also lets you drag photos to locations manually. Books lets you make Blurb books from your photos. Apple Aperture and iPhone users will be familiar with such things already.
Next is video playback. Now imported video files can be watched and trimmed from within Lightroom. Previously an external player was launched, which was rather clunky.
Getting deeper, the Develop module has been tweaked. There's a new "process version" (the rendering engine that generate images from the RAW data) which does away with the various recovery tools and replaces them with smart, content-aware highlight and shadow adjustments. I have played with them for a little while and they seem to work well, although it feels weird to not have the old knobs to tweak.
Also new is lossy compression for RAW DNG files, and also the option to export a RAW image at a lower resolution, ideal for sharing RAW files without the large file-size.
There are also new local adjustments, which will now let you brush on changes in noise reduction, temperature and tint, shadows, highlights, and moire.
Lightroom also now has soft-proofing (at last) and you can e-mail an image direct from the app. The release notes cheerfully admit that this last is a feature which "has 1998 written all over it."
Everything else, though, is brand new. While there might not be a lot of bell s and whistles, pro photographers are going to be very happy with Lightroom 4.
Lightroom 4 beta now available [Lightroom Journal]
