Adobe today announced its new Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4 beta for Windows and Mac, and has made it available as a free public download. 

 

Lightroom is a digital photography workflow solution, which enables amateur and professional photographers to quickly import, manage, enhance and showcase their images.

 

The Lightroom 4 beta is a preview of the new features and capabilities that will be offered in the final release of Lightroom 4, which is expected to be released early this year.

 

 

The company explained that the beta offers refined technology for superior shadow and highlight processing and expanded management capabilities, including enhanced DSLR video support.

 

The software features additional local adjustment controls, including Noise Reduction, Moire and White Balance, as well as new basic tonal adjustment controls, which can extract the entire dynamic range from cameras for better shadow details and highlights.

 

Additionally, new 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.

 

Many standard Lightroom image adjustment controls can also be applied to video clips and adjusted videos can be exported as a H.264 file or published directly to Facebook or Flickr.

 

 

The company added that the Lightroom 4 beta further provides photographers the tools to create impressive photo books with rich text controls and a variety of easy-to-use 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 and provides location tagging controls and saved locations for effortless assignment of a photographer’s common locations.

 

In the Develop module, the addition of soft proofing is intended to help photographers tune images in a destination colour space to ensure prints and Web content look their best. Email support is also included, meaning that users will be able to email images directly from Lightroom using an email account of their choice (including Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail).

 

 

The company has encouraged photographers to try the beta release and provide feedback to the product team.

 

“Giving early customer access to new versions of Lightroom has helped our team deliver an outstanding battle-tested product that really stands up to the demands of photographers worldwide,” explained Winston Hendrickson, vice president of digital imaging products at Adobe.