Adobe Lightroom Beta 4

Today Adobe announced the beta 4 release of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom as a free download for your use until the commercially available product is released. There is no announced date for the final release of LR4 but the beta product expires March 31, 2012 so we can assume the final release will be close to that date unless Adobe releases another beta.

Lightroom 4 Feature List

Email directly from Lightroom
Enhanced highlight & shadow recovery tools to bring out more detail that your camera captures.
Additional local editing tools including a moire brush tool
White balance brush
Video support including organizing, viewing, and basic video edit tools.
Easy video publishing to Facebook and Flickr
Softproofing (yeh!)
Photo book creation with integration with Blurb. Feature utilizes easy to use templates.
Maps with location based organization if your camera supports GPS or you have tagged your images.

Lightroom 4 Requirments

Windows

Intel® Pentium® 4 or AMD Athlon® 64 processor
Microsoft® Windows Vista® with Service Pack 2 or Windows 7 with Service Pack 1
2GB of RAM
1GB of available hard-disk space
1024×768 display
DVD-ROM drive
Internet connection required for Internet-based services*

Mac OS

Multicore Intel processor with 64-bit support
Mac OS X v10.6.8 or v10.7
2GB of RAM
1GB of available hard-disk space
1024×768 display
DVD-ROM drive
Internet connection required for Internet-based services*

Ok, let’s get serious here. 2GB of RAM is not enough for this monster of an application unless you run it all by itself with no other applications running and your file sizes are not too large. I’m running a Mac Pro with 16GB of memory and LR quickly gobbles up 1.4GB immediately after launching the application into Develop module. Along with Mail, Safari & iTunes and 5.5GB of RAM has already disappeared.

Summary

Adobe is making some nice additional features along with a new 2012 raw develop process to provide enhanced image processing to bring the most out of your RAW files. Blurb integration will be an interesting addition and on the surface the interface looks elegant and functional. Finally, Adobe has built in e-mail support into LR. Only in depth testing will really tell how well Adobe has put all of this together.

I personally look foreword to the photographic advances of this coming year! With the new dSLR’s being released, more advanced software, and a growing online community to help each other through the learning curves – it will be good!

Download Lightroom 4 Beta, and check out our Lightroom 3 Presets!

One Response to “Adobe Lightroom Beta 4”

Adobe Changes Upgrade Options for CS6 | Rule of Thirds Photography said...

[...] Currently I am unaware of any of the up and coming features, however if the upgrades found in Lightroom 4 Beta have anything to say about the rest of the Adobe CS6 suite – they should be [...]