Adobe posts Photoshop Lightroom 4 Beta 1 -- get it now!
Say, photo buffs, if all these new, stinking cameras announced at the Consumer Electronics Show excite you, don't cool your jets yet. I just got spam mail from Adobe. Photoshop Lightroom 4.0 Beta 1 is now available. I downloaded the Windows 64-bit version right away and installed it on my Lenovo ThinkPad T420s.
It's a hefty download, more than 410MB. Given this is CES Day 1, I don't have time for any kind of review. But I must say this: Norton Internet Security 2012 auto-protect sent up the red flag during install, regarding two DLLs -- "mc_enc_mpa.dll" and "qtp.parser.dll", which were quarantined. That's gotcha #1. The second surprised even more. LR 4 Beta 1 warned on opening that it couldn't open "Lightroom 3 Catalog" because "the Lighroom 4 Beta release does not support catalog upgrades". I created a new one, and, of course, it's empty. Hey, I'm really loving this software now.
I took a quick look, nevertheless, and didn't see anything radically new in the user interface. I did see some location stuff that looked unfamiliar. Emphasis: Quick, who knows what's really changed UI-wise. Here's what Adobe says is new:
- 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.
If you dare, you can download the beta here: For Mac, 32-bit and 64-bit Windows. Software requires: Mac OS X v10.6.8 or 10.7; Windows Vista Service Pack 2 or Windows 7 Service Pack 1.
Lightroom 4 Beta 1 expires on March 31.