Lightroom 4 Beta is out

[pakodominguez]

Lightroom Blog
http://blogs.adobe.com/lightroomjournal ... lable.html
Download:
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/lightroom4/

Tune in to @KelbyTraining TODAY starting at 7 a.m. PST for a day of webcasts with #Lightroom’s Tom Hogarty: bit.ly/ykwV5J

PS: Now, soft proofing!

[artington]

Yes, soft proofing will be the big reaeon to upgrade

[agorabasta]

I played with this beta. So far noticed two good things - the highlight colour restoration is simply superb and generally the highlight recovery works much better, practically without artifacts; the second is the automatic CA reduction that works very good without even knowing the lens attached, also for the fully manual lenses.

One bad thing is that they removed any manual CA control completely. No matter how good is the automatic CA correction, its algorithm has to make some compromises, and certain parts of the image may be corrected better than the other. I really need the manual CA correction tweaks so that I could choose the compromises rather than that stupid proggie doing it for me.

Also, they have changed the names and functions of the basic exposure controls turning them into some absolutely arbitrary things. So there's no 'brightness' control anymore, and that old 'brightness' was a simple straightforward gamma control, a very useful thing as it was. Changing the 'blacks' level now happens only with some compression/expansion in the shadow tones, and you simply cannot get any straight cut-off clipping. Same for the highlights - the highlight recovery is always there, you cannot switch it off completely; so there's no way to easily clip some parts of the image to white. Those are some terminally brain-dead decisions on the part of Adobe.

So I really hope for some basic sanity coming back to their minds when they release the real thing.

Still all in all, this beta produces very good results in the absolute majority of cases, visibly better than Lr3 does.

[Dr. Harout]

Agorabasta, nice arguments. I really hope Adobe listens.
I do.

[bfitzgerald]

I'd like to see an amber/blue adjustment in WB this is sorely missing and very very obvious to my eyes!
Sometimes I can't quite get the WB as I want it it's needed no question.

[agorabasta]

Barry, you have that 'blue-amber' as the colour temperature adjustment. That and the green-magenta control are supposed to be close to orthogonal in the middle of the range, so adding one more 'blue-amber' axis on the same two-dimensional surface would simply get you nothing else above the existing controls.

But what is really needed is the control of correlation between Cr and Cb colour differential channels. It's really necessary because if some colour gets too dominant in the scene, our eyes/brain act to suppress that colour, e.g. the green is suppressed if the light gets to you mostly through the trees' foliage in the forest. But the camera sensor doesn't adapt like the eye/brain does, and shooting in the green forest you get too much green and purple hues; which simply means that Cr and Cb are too much correlated. So to correct that, it's necessary to subtract some Cb from Cr and vice-versa. (Or in the Lab colour do a'=k1*a+k2*b; b'=k1*b+k2*a, where k1+k2=1.)

[bfitzgerald]

I'm not sure it's the same thing because I've used other software that had an additional slider (ie silkypix) for blue/amber as well as the traditional slider for cooler/warmer but I can't quite get the results I like in LR3. What you are saying makes perfect sense but it's something that has bothered me a bit.

It's like the Km5d I can set the kelvin balance and adjust green/magenta, but on the D90 I can also set amber/blue adjustments as well as green/magenta and the kelvin temperature. It does make a difference for tweaking. I am very WB aware of late and even slight shifts can be annoying so I correct as much as possible.