Adobe has released Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4 (http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop-lightroom.html) for Mac OS X (10.6.8 and higher) and Windows. Lightroom is a digital photography workflow solution designed to help amateur and professional photographers import, manage, enhance and showcase their images.
Lightroom 4 costs US$149 for the full version and US$79 for the upgrade. It introduces refined technology for shadow and highlight processing, the ability to create photo books, additional local adjustment controls, and enhanced video support.
According to Winston Hendrickson, vice president of Digital Imaging Products, Adobe, Lightroom 4 adds significant new capabilities and innovations. New adjustment controls maximize dynamic range from cameras, recovering exceptional shadow details and highlights, he adds.The software features new and improved auto adjustments to dynamically set values for exposure and contrast, and additional local adjustment controls including Noise Reduction, Moire and White Balance.
Lightroom 4 provides photographers the tools to create photo books with text controls and a variety of templates, as well as a direct link for photo book creation from within the new Book module. A new Map module displays images already assigned a location, provides location tagging and reverse geo-tagging controls and saved locations for assignment of a photographer’s common locations.
With Lightroom 4, native video support gives photographers the capability to play, trim and extract frames from video clips shot on DSLRs, point-and-shoot cameras and smartphones. Video-specific presets and standard Lightroom image adjustment controls can be applied to video clips, and adjusted videos can be exported as a H.264 file or published directly to Facebook or Flickr.
In the Develop module, presets utilize new processing technology and the addition of soft proofing helps photographers tune images in a destination color space to ensure content looks its best, says Hendrickson. In addition, customers can now email images directly from Lightroom using an email account of their choice.
