Adobe Lightroom 4, Alain Briot First Impressions

I started using Lightroom 4in April and here are what I consider to be the most exciting new features.

New Raw Conversion algorithm and shadow-highlight controls
The excting new thing about Lightroom 4 are the new, and much better raw conversion algorithms.

Improved Highlight-shadow recovery
The second most exciting thing are the improved highlight -shadow recovery controls. These work differently from Lightroom 3, but the changes are for the better.  Far more effective shadow and recovery control, allowing us to do things -recover over and under exposed areas– that we could not do before.

Book Creation
Lightroom 4  also featuresa book creation pane which is new.

Profiled print preview
You can do a profiled print preview right from  Lightroom prior to printing!

Video
Lightroom handles video directly now. You import movies the same way you import photographs.  Once imported you can do basic video edits in Lightroom including cropping the start and end of a movie (but apparently not cut out part of the midlle of a movie unless I didn’t figure out how to do that), adjusting color, contrast and a few other things.

Upgrading
I recommend upgrading. It’s $79 if you have any previous version, not a major expense.   Also, Adobe is changing their upgrade policy and if they do the same as with Photoshop, you won’t be able to get the upgrade pricing unless you have the last version released before the update.

Alain Briot