Lightroom 4 Beta Review / First Look

I've been a big Lightroom fan from the very beginning, so much so that I've virtually stopped using Photoshop CS (despite 17 years of retouching experience). IMO that's how good LR is for photographers. So just this week, Adobe Labs has released the Lightroom 4 Beta, and I thought I'd give it a whirl. The big new features are:

• Changes to the Spot Adjust Brush
• Blurb Books integration
• GPS data integration

In fact the first to are so big, they have their own tabs in with the original 5 modules, making it a total of 7. Lets start with the Spot Adjustment. In oder to demonstrate clearly, this screenshot shows Lightroom 3 on the left, and the same module in Lightroom 4 Beta on the right.

As you can see, there are two important changes to the interface. The first being the very badly needed spot color correction which is now on top of the module; the second, below the standard controls gives you control over local Sharpness, Noise and Moiré.

Next is the Books module which allows export directly to Blurb.com or to PDF. Essentially Lightroom 4 Beta now integrates all of the functions of Blurb's Booksmart® software directly into a Lightroom module that operates very similar to the Web module. Here's a screenshot with some random files from my image library:

If you've used Lightroom 3 (or 2) to make web galleries, or are already familiar with Booksmart, you'll have no problem making your own books in this module, it's quite intuitive.

The last big change is the addition of the Map module. Basically it allows you to read GPS data from your camera and plot it on a Google Maps style interface.

For every selected photo that has a GPS marker, you'll get a small orange square on the map. Clicking on the square will give you a small preview of the photo. Generally I would say this isn't avery useful function for most photographers, especially since most cameras aren't GPS aware. For now it's a fun toy to play with. One camera I do have that does GPS tagging is my iPhone, and since I run all my iPhone photos through Lightroom anyway, I'm going to start tagging everything and see if I can make some sense/use of it in the future. In order to have your photos tagged, you need to go into Settings > Location Services, then enable Location Services and turn on Camera. Looks like this:

In addition, if you have photos that don't have GPS data, you can imbed it manually. Just find the location on the map, select the photo in the strip below, then control-click on the map, you'll get this pop-up menu:

Click on that and Bob's Your Uncle, you've got GPS coordinates added to the metadata of your file!