Adobe released a free beta version of Lightroom 4 or Photoshop Lightroom 4, as it is officially known, early this month. This is the first beta of the image management software which is eventually going to replace the current Lightroom version 3, maybe later this year. Lightroom 4.0 drops support for Windows XP, but introduces several new features including a completely new book-creation module, expanded support for video, soft proofing capability, and geo-tagging of still and video images via a Google Maps-powered module. Image editing tools have also been significantly updated, with a new process version that includes a reworking of the Basic panel controls and new localized editing options.
Brief list of new features and improvements in Adobe Lightroom 4 beta.
- Location-based organization lets you find and group images by location, assign locations to images, and display data from GPS-enabled cameras.
- Extended video support for organizing, viewing, and making adjustments and edits to video clips. You can now trim video clips and extract individual frames as JPEGs.
- Image adjustments settings can now be applied to videos as well, which is perhaps one of the most best thing to have.
- Easy video publishing lets you publish and share video clips on Facebook and Flickr.
- There are also new local adjustment controls, which let users to edit specific regions of an image for items like white balance or noise reduction.
- White balance brush to refine and adjust white balance in specific areas of your images.
- Better highlight and shadow recovery brings out all the detail that your camera captures in dark shadows and bright highlights.
- A soft-proofing feature allows you to preview an image as it will appear when printed on a particular printer/press and paper
- Adobe has teamed up with self-publishing service Blurb by which you can build books using the print service's templates and send them off for printing directly from within the application. You can also output PDFs for other print services.
- Email pictures directly from Lightroom using your preferred email program.
You can download the beta from labs.adobe.com and use it until the product expires on March 31, 2012.
[via DPreview]
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