Today Adobe has made Lightroom 4 Beta available for free, until it is officially released March 31, to anyone who wants to try it out. Two of the many new features look very promising.
- New slides in the Basic Panel for better highlight and shadow recovery
- Being able to paint White Balance with local adjustment brush
And remember, even if you don’t use Lightroom, these new features will, at some time in the future, be a part of Camera Raw. So Camera Raw uses my want to take a look at all the new features. Very exciting stuff—local noise reduction, better Clarity, soft proofing, adjust the individual R, G and B channels with curves (just like in Photoshop) and more! Check them out.
This all means that even fewer on my images will ever see Photoshop and that means less time spent at the computer working images. And hopefully that means more time of other stuff like shooting more images.
Just Google Lightroom 4 or go the the Adobe Labs Lightroom 4 Beta site to learn more and download the ap.
As with all Beta software you should not use it for production work. In the case of this beta you should not use LR4 to manage your image files. Continue to use LR3 for that. Use and play with LR4 on a “dummy” catalog.