Lightroom 4 beta - A hands on review

[stubbsy]

Lightroom 4 beta has been out since late January and I've been playing with it for a while (download is HERE).

Here is the "what's new" list from Adobe:

• 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.

Some of this is a but ho hum for me (video publishing, emaling from LR). Some has me perplexed (a photo book module that is in essence an add-on for the Blurb Photo Book service, but not terribly compatible with other publishers) and some is pretty neat. I'll touch on the latter below and update my observations as time passes.

The new Map module
Previous versions had some support for GPS metadata, but with LR4 you more easily add GPS metadata. With LR4 you can load tracklogs directly (GPX format only so I'll probably still use the excellent Friedl GPS plugin) or it will read GPS info from your sidecar files or direct from the EXIF data. That alone is not a lot different. The big difference is it's all pulled together in a new Map module. There you can see your GPS image data on Google maps or you can search to locate a map location and drag the location to images and LR will tag the images with that GPS location. As an example the screenshot below is after zooming in on the map to view a spot where I took a number of images at Mt Tomah Botanical Gardens earlier this year. It shows markers (with number of images at that spot) for each geotagged image. I've clicked one of the markers and the image taken there has popped up.



Additionally within the GPS module you can have "collections" of GPS locations (centred around a single point with a radius you specify in km). Clicking a collection will display ALL the matching images from the LR library. In the screenshot below you can see the radius for the Mt Tomah location as the circle in the google map image.

[stubbsy]

Changes to Basic panel in Develop module.

There have been a few noticeable changes here.


The slider for brightness has gone
No Brightness slider has taken a bit of getting used to. To adjust overall brightness you need to use the Blacks slider AND the new Whites slider. The way those sliders work is different too. 0 is now the centre of the slider whereas in LR3 0 was the extrteme left of the slider. In LR3 dragging the Blacks slider from 0 to the right darkened the blacks, now dragging from 0 to the right brightens the blacks. To darken them you drag to the left to give negative values. Once you're used to it this makes more sense since ALL sliders now have 0 in the centre allowing both positive and negative values.

The sliders for Fill Light and Recovery have been replaced
This one was an easier transition. Think of the Highlights Slider as the old Recovery slider and Shadows as the old Fill slider. They are different though as their impact is now isolated to slightly different areas of the histogram as are exposure and the other sliders in the Basic panel.

Overall I find this a noticeable improvment as it gives me finer control of the image adjustment process. The standardisation of all sliders with 0 in the centre is a huge improvement.

[stubbsy]

Changes to Localised Adjust in the Develop module
This area has also had a big overhaul. Below are the two compared.



In previous versions of LR the sliders in local adjust mode were different to those available in global image adjustment mode. LR 4 has standardised this so they are the same in localised adjust mode as they are in global adjust mode. This not only simplifies things, but it gives you more control, You can now, for example, adjust White Balance in just part of an image (such as removing blues from shadow detail by warming it up).

This is a huge improvement and will further reduce my need to use Photoshop

[stubbsy]

Other interesting changes
Histogram
The histogram is now broken up into 5 areas which correspond to sliders that change the image. From left to right the areas are: Blacks, Shadows, Exposure, Highlights and Whites. This was previously 4 areas. Below is a comparison that also shows the finer control on offer. In LR3 the area adjusted when using Exposure adjustment was a larger part of the image than that impacted in LR4 by the same slider.



Tone Curve
In addition to the ability to alter the tone curve for the entire image you can now adjust the curve for just the red, green or blue channel. Not sure if I'll use this much.



Import Settings
In the Import dialog, instead of a giant drop down listing all Import Presets in alphabetical order they are now in a tidier folder structure. Much easier to navigate and way better than before



Soft Proofing
You can now specify an input profile (for your monitor) and an output profile (eg for your printer or say sRGB for saving to file) and soft proofing will show (in red) areas of your image that will be out of gamut on the target and allow you to adjust the image so it fits the target profile. All this is done on a virtual copy of the original. See before (where the red area in the middle of the flower is the out of gamut part) and after below (changes were made to saturation of some colours). This is with output set to the profile for my printer. Nice.

[surenj]

That is neat Peter. This would be gold for people who are documenting nature etc!

[ATJ]

Thanks for the detailed review, Peter. I have been meaning to try it out. I wonder if they fixed all those bugs that were introduced in LR3 (and some that were introduced in LR2).

[ATJ]

I wonder if they fixed all those bugs that were introduced in LR3 (and some that were introduced in LR2).

Nope! And they have introduced some even more stupid things. Why, oh, why are these programmers allowed to work in their own worlds so far from reality?

[Wink]

What problems are those?

[stubbsy]

I wonder if they fixed all those bugs that were introduced in LR3 (and some that were introduced in LR2).

Nope! And they have introduced some even more stupid things. Why, oh, why are these programmers allowed to work in their own worlds so far from reality?

Sad isn't it. The entire Book module bothers me. That would have taken a fair bit of work for what is really just a front end for Blurb right down to giving you pricing. I wonder how much demand there was for that one! Time spent on that could have been spent much more profitably elsewhere. Maybe Adobe get a percentage for every book sale they drive to Blurb.

And yes I know you can also save the book as PDF, but very few book publishers accept PDF eg MyPublisher and Asuka don't and Momento charge extra for PDFs

[ATJ]

What problems are those?

Here are just two...

When you create keywords you can add synonyms for them. Most of my keywords are scientific names (because they are unique) and I put common names into the synonyms. I add keywords to all my photos by selecting them from my extensive keyword list. The Keyword List has a "Filter Keywords" field. In LR2 (and briefly in one subsequent build of LR3), I could enter a synonym into the "Filter Keywords" list and it would match the keyword. They broke that in LR3 and it is still broken in LR4. I have raised it through the official channels as a bug and they have even acknowledged it as a bug but still haven't fixed it.

LR allows you to import directly from the memory card (with either move or copy). You can also backup the files to a second location. For some ridiculous reason, if you choose to backup to the second location, it always adds an extra folder "Imported on date". There is no way to turn it off. Sure some people might want that, but not everyone and certainly not me. So the function is crippled because some small minded programmer thinks their way is the only way. In LR4, they have broken it even further. Now with the primary location it adds unwanted subdirectories. DO they have any quality control at all - or perhaps that's why they run a beta program: make the punters do their testing for them and then after we find all their bugs (and they perhaps fix a 3rd of them) they still charge us full price for the upgrade.

[Wink]

Fair enough.

[stubbsy]

Andrew

I was about to say raise them as bugs in the beta HERE, but I see you've already done that

[Remorhaz]

Very nice writeup Peter. I must say that whilst I've installed LR4 and had a quick look I havn't actually Imported any images.

Do you know if I can point it at say my current 2012 image folder and have it reference them (with a new LR4 catalog) without it copying the actual image files (so LR3 and LR4 both point to the same sources)?

[ATJ]

Do you know if I can point it at say my current 2012 image folder and have it reference them (with a new LR4 catalog) without it copying the actual image files (so LR3 and LR4 both point to the same sources)?

Import without moving or copying and it will just references the files where they are.