Adobe Lightroom 4 Beta - First impressions

Well, I just downloaded Adobe's new Lightroom 4 beta and have been playing with it for the last two hours. There are some really neat things here that I will talk about. Adobe posted this list of new features: 

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. 

This isn't going to be the most in-depth review of all the new features so I'll pick a couple and then give my impressions of functionality.

One of my favorite new things is the white balance brush, among the additional local editing features this comes as a great relief to me because I despise mixed color temperatures in my compositions. Shooting in incandescent light near a sunlit window will give you very orange inside or very blue outside, but not anymore! 

In my test image I noticed that the color temp of the trees in the background was different than the foreground, a perfect test for the brush tool! 

Neat, huh? You may notice that I did a few other things to the image, this brings me to the next feature which I very much like; highlight and shadow recovery. 

      

The immediate difference is evident (left: Lightroom 3, right: Lightroom 4), gone are Recovery, Fill Light, Black Level and Brightness. Lightroom 4 now has Highlights, Shadows, White level and Black level. This is especially good if you are trying to pull detail out of shadows and highlights or trying to get a pseudo-HDR look out of a single raw file. 

While it is a thumbnail of my screen, you can see that there was detail pulled out of the highlights that were almost blown out in the before image and at the same time, detail pulled out of the shadows while still maintaining proper exposure overall. I noticed that, unlike adding a ton of fill light, there was no haloing effect that can happen when you fill too much. However, you still get a slight saturation in the reds just like fill light. 

If you get LR4 and you find you do not like this way of editing you still have the option of returning to the previous process (2010). 

Selecting the 2010 process will bring back the same control options as LR3, but it will leave this little annoying exclamation icon down in the corner of every image until you change it to 2012 process. 

All this talk about process brings me to my final observation in LR4, functionality with presets based upon the 2010 process. When I added my favorite black and white preset it came across almost perfect. Note that it switched the image to 2010 process, giving me the above exclamation point. 

However, it did not bring across my curve settings, I think this is a glitch with the beta and should be fixed in later releases so we will just ignore that for now. So the first thing I did was switch it to the 2012 process. 

Which zeroed the new process details (note: I zeroed out the curve myself). So I had to add my curve preset manually (the individual presets transfer over and work no problem), and with a little bit of tweaking I was able to recreate my original effect in the new process. 

All in all, I feel like this is a really good update for Adobe Lightroom. I can't wait for them to release it! Keep in mind, this is only a beta version so I do not recommend using it for work (see photo) 

It crashed on me twice as I was working on this review. Woo! Luckily it did not damage the catalog so all my changes were saved real-time. 

Feel free to download LR4 Beta 1 from Adobe Labs http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/lightroom4/ and have fun!