Adobe Photoshop Lightroom provides a powerful set of tools with a singular focus: making our photos look amazing. In the past Adobe has opened up their ‘lab’ and allowed early access to in-development tools to a limited audience. Now Adobe is opening up their Lightroom 4 beta to EVERYONE! It is a great opportunity to get a peek at the upcoming version of one of the most powerful photo editors available.
Here are some of the new features:
Lightroom 4 beta is a major software update adding a broad range of new capabilities based on feedback provided by the photography community. All new basic tonal adjustment controls extract the entire dynamic range from cameras for stunning shadow details and highlights. The software features additional local adjustment controls, including Noise Reduction, Moire and White Balance.
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.
Lightroom 4 beta provides photographers the tools to create impressive photo books with rich text controls and a variety of easy-to-use templates, as well as a direct link for photo book creation from within the new Book module. Also, a new intuitive Map module displays images already assigned a location, provides location tagging controls and saved locations for effortless assignment of a photographer’s common locations.
In the Develop module, the addition of soft proofing helps photographers tune images in a destination color space to ensure prints and Web content look their best. In addition, customers can now email images directly from Lightroom using an email account of their choice including Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail.
Head to Adobe Labs and grab the beta of Lightroom 4 – and let us know what you think!