https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/entitlement/index.cfm?e=labs_lightroom4 New Features in Lightroom 4 Beta 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. The Lightroom 4 beta program is available to the public. Anyone with an Internet connection can download it and start putting it to the test. You do not need to own (or have tried) a previous version of Lightroom. You can download the beta and use it until the product expires on March 31, 2012.
I spent approximately 3 minutes playing with LR4, in particular the new shadows and highlights tools. I expected an extension of the old recovery tool, but that's not how it works. The highlights and shadows recovery tools are seperate. Whereas before dialing up (i.e. to the right) recovery dulled highlights and recovered some detail, now dialing up the highlight recovery *brightens* the highlights. So if you're used to sliding to the right to recover highlight detail, you're in for a surprise: go to the left. The shadow recovery tool works the same way: right increases shadows intensity, left recovers detail. They added a white tool to complement the existing black tool. They reversed the direction on the black tool (and followed suit with the white tool). So, dragging to the right on blacks works like dragging to the left did before. Also, both tools start centered, rather than to the left (mostly) like the blacks in previous releases. Haven't played with the whitebalance brush yet. Gotta take a picture with dramatically different light sources. As expected, recovering shadow info presents a noise issue. A camera with a wide dynamic range is preferable, but this has a lot of potential. The following comparison is: LR3 - tone curve adjusted (shadows only), LR4 shadows adjusted (new tool only): Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login
