Before Christmas I was invited to see a demo of the new Lighroom 4. I’ve been dying to unveil the new changes to you, but had to keep my mouth shut until today. There are some VERY excited changes that have been made, which I’m so excited to share with you!
Here are the highlights:
1) One thing I use Photoshop for that I haven’t been able to do in Lightroom previously is album design. If you like using Blurb to make albums, you’ll love that Lightroom has partnered with Blurb to make creating photo books that much easier. In just one click you can publish your book to Blurb.
Included in the book module are professionally designed templates. You can also add text. It would be awesome if in the near future templates for specific photo labs and album companies were added as well! But, the new book module will do for now!
2) Another feature I am super excited about is the ability to play and edit videos from DSLRs, point and shoots and even smart phones. Since I’ve been using my 5D Mark II more, I have been trying out video. The problem I’ve been having is that my pictures always look way better than my video. In Lightroom 4 you can make basic color corrections to the video including white balance, exposure, contrast among other things. Hello? How cool is that? You can also trim your videos as well. This is a feature I will be using a lot! And you can directly publish the videos to Facebook and Flickr as well!
3) Local editing adjustments have been added including the ability to do a local noise reduction and white balance, which is AWESOME! There have been changes made which should also simplify the develop module.
4) With a new map module you can now “geotag” your images and organize them by location. This makes searching your images that much easier!
5) Emailing images has been simplified. With Lightroom 4 you are able to email images directly in Lightroom using any email account that you’d like! It’s super easy.
There are many more improvements, but don’t take my word for it. You can download the beta version of Lightroom 4 here… for FREE! Go try it out for yourself and let me know what you think! Have fun!