Adobe Lightroom 4 Update

Adobe have now released Adobe Lightroom 4 and it’s allot cheaper. I think this is because apple have reduced the price of aperture, and now aperture is very good they now have some real competition. I have always used Adobe Lightroom from the first Beta release, and it has saved me days of work on wedding images. The ability to work manually at a wedding and produce consistent exposures has allowed us to use Adobe Lightroom to synchronise all of our images and cut our edit time down to 3-4 hours for 1000 images. I have been very impressed with the role out of Adobe Lightroom and now lightroom 4 is here I am looking at what they have changed. They have added basic video editing with the ability to change exposure ect – which is great if you are combining stills and video and need a consistent look. You can also take a snapshot at any stage of you video clip to produce a still image – This sounds very interesting as I know that the future of capture for stills could be video based. The ability to do this at a wedding to capture key moments with no shutter sound is very powerfull. I will take a look at this feature of lightroom 4 in future training videos. I also like the introduction of the Book Module and so you can now easily produce a photobook in lightroom 4. I think Adobe realise what we all want is to learn one software package and a simple workflow for video and stills. I will be doing quite a bit of video and time-lapse this year and my whole workflow will constucted in Adobe lightroom 4 and LR timelapse. The ability to use one software package to reduce the time spent behind the screen has always been the aim.

The Adobe lightroom Develop module has changed quite allot with improvements in local corrections using the brush tool. My favourite slider has always been the recovery tool which I use by overexposing the image about 1/3 of a stop and then recover detail in the highlights in the dress in Adobe lightroom 3 – It has now disappeared but I think the new lightroom 4 system will be better. As you can see from the last video Adobe have improved the process version to the new 2012 process – this will mean better shadow and highlight detail from your RAW files.

Here are a few sample videos from the Adobe Lightroom Channel – I will keep you updated

Video courtesy of TheLightroomLab.com

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4 Beta New Process Version Comparison from David Marx on Vimeo.