January 10, 2012

LightRoom 4 (beta)

January 10, 2012

Hat tip to Jeffrey Friedl, he's who I heard about the LR4 beta from first. I had no idea it would be dropping so soon, so it came to me as an unexpected and pleasant surprise. There are a bunch of fairly serious changes to the Develop module (where all the adjustments are made). I'm pretty excited about the major differences actually, as there isn't an easy way to do the equivalent of Photoshop (PS) levels in LR. This really got me for one image in particular (see here for details, mine's the second to last image). Granted that was "earlier in my career", but even after being clued in, I wasn't able to get a result I liked in LR. Aperture did okay, and I played a bit with some other softwares (Acorn, Darktable, Rawtherapee), but I really like all the other things that LR does, more so than anything else I've seen, so I'd like to stick with it.

There are other places that discuss the feature changes in good detail, notably dpreview.com and Lightroom Queen. Other than that, my suggestion is just to download it and start playing!

I'll show off that initial success. First, the poor showing, if you couldn't get over to that link I put above. I'll put it small, because it's really ugly, and I don't want to hurt your eyes.

Cornes Du Chamois

Cornes du Chamois

France (2011)

After the suggestion that this image could be a lot better with just a little tweak, I got this (bigger, 'cause it's better)

Cornes du Chamoise (repro)

Cornes du Chamois

France (2011)

It's better, but still doesn't feel up to snuff for me. Just for your information, that second version took me quite a while, not hours and hours, but probably a couple of hours. I learned some from that.

Cornes du Chamois (repro, again)

Cornes du Chamois

France (2011)

You can probably guess that I like this picture and really want it to look good. After this play around (again), I think I might have had enough for a while. It's still not as good as I'd like it to be, but that might be because of the photographers camera skills at the time rather than the postpro skillz.

A final word on the beta-ness of the LR4 beta. I'd classify it as "definitely beta". It's worked great on the first image I tried. But it crashed over and over on the second image. Enough that I gave up and deleted that image from the LR4 beta library. I'll wait for beta2 to work on that one. And one more thing, just to be clear, don't work on your original files with the beta, make a copy and import the copy.

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