Adobe Lightroom 4 Beta Test Drive
-updated January 13, 2011-
As most photographers know, on January 10, Adobe released the public beta version of the new Lightroom 4. Personally, I’m pretty new to the Lightroom game. The fist version I had even used was Lightroom 3 and at that, I’ve only really used it to convert RAW files to JPEG when processing portraits. And if you’ve followed my work for any amount of time, you realize that isn’t much. But in the past couple of months, I have really made it a point to try to do more processing in Lightroom and less in Photoshop- on everything. I have been quite happy with the outcome and am happy to say that I am spending less and less time in Photoshop. When I saw that Lightroom 4 Beta was available, I was excited to give it a try. Hopefully the next few paragraphs and photos can help to explain it a little. Note: the photos attached were edited entirely with Lightroom 4 Beta.
The first thing I noticed when opening Lightroom 4 Beta was that there were two new modules- ‘Book’ and ‘Map.’ Map (finally) allows you to geotag your photos in the Lightroom collections and they are then sorted on a map of the world. You can zoom in or out as far as you want to be as precise as you want in your locations. Simply drag and drop and your photos are tagged with the GPS coordinates of that location. Pretty neat.
‘Book’ simply gives you the layouts from Blurb.com inside Lightroom. Create your book and export directly to Blurb to print. Again, awesome.
As far as the ‘Develop’ module, things are the similar to before but at the same time, so much better. The ‘Fill Light’ and ‘Recovery’ sliders have been replaced with much more intuitive ‘Shadows’ and ‘Highlights’ sliders. They work so much better than the previous options and give a much more natural look when you have to crank them up. Another big thing I noticed was a much better Adjustment Brush. Maybe it’s just my mind playing tricks on me, but the brush seems so much more responsive and allows for much more subtle tweaks than the previous version. I hated using it in Lightroom 3, but in 4- I love it. In fact, I used it on almost all the photos I worked on. It will be a huge time saver in keeping me out of Photoshop.
For this image, I brought back detail in the window by lowering the exposure 1 stop with the Adjustment Brush. I was really pretty impressed with it.
I really gave the adjustment brush a workout on this image. Also, the ‘Shadows’ and ‘Highlights’ sliders did a great job of bringing out the detail in the foreground, house and sky.
I have also noticed much better ability to retain details when using the ‘Noise Reduction’ setting as well. At low levels of application, the Lightroom 3 reduction was fantastic, but lots of detail was lost at mid to high level application (to be expected). But with Lightroom 4, higher levels of application are fantastic.
On to one slight negative aspect that I came across. My presets didn’t work the same was as they did in Lightroom 3. I would imagine that the cause of this is the addition of the ‘Shadows’ and ‘Highlights’ sliders and the removal of the ‘Fill light’ and ‘Recovery.’ Some of the presets worked fine, but many were quite wonky. But I was able to notice a difference in all of them. I’m sure that if you’re big into presetting Lightroom, you will be able to tweak your settings to work just fine. Similarly, if you have paid settings, I’m sure the creators will supply an updated download to you.
In conclusion, I really like the changes made to Lightroom 4. It amazes me that improvements can be made to a product that seems so great to begin with. With just one shoot edited with Lightroom 4 beta, I’m sure that I’ll discover more that I like/dislike about it in the coming weeks. Look for updates to this post as I go on.
Content copyright 2012, Zach Frailey. Do not use without permission.
Today’s photo is another that I shot on my recent trip to Orlando with my good friend Ben (doubleBblog.com). We took a short detour into Savannah, GA to see the historic district and were not disappointed. Savannah is such a beautiful and photogenic city! Everywhere we turned, there was architecture that was hundreds of years old. I shot this church near one of the many squares throughout town. Though I made it look very imposing through my processing, it was actually a very magnificent building. I look forward to another visit to Savannah sometime in the near future, and this time I will spend more than an hour exploring this great town!
