PT4U Lightroom Master Sean McCormack tells us what's new in Lightroom 4 BETA

Great news for Lightroom users. At 5am this morning, the Public Beta of Lightroom 4 was announced. Go to http://labs.adobe.com and grab yours. 

Here are Sean's favourite things about Lightroom 4 BETA,

1. Process Version 2012

The way that Lightroom processes files has changed. And it's way better. Effectively the processing is now much closer to tone mapping (from HDR imaging). The sliders are different, and they do different things. Fill Light and Recovery are gone, as is Brightness. We have Exposure, Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, Whites and Blacks instead. Best way is to start from the top down, and then go back to tweak.

2. Book

The new Book module is great for book layout going to Blurb books, or to PDF. It's not an Album generator just yet. Want to make a quick book of photos? Open a collection, go to Book. IN Auto Layout, click 'Clear Layout'. In the Presets, Choose ' One Photo Per Page, and then Auto Layout. Easy. There's way more complexity that that though, but it's a great start. 

3. Map

The new Map Module is great for pinning photos on the map to see where you've been. It also handle GPS tracklogs, albeit in a basic way. 

4. Soft Proofing

You can now Soft Proof in Lightroom. Soft proofing is a way of using printer profiles to see how a image will look in Print, before you waste the ink! This is way better than Photoshop's Soft Proofing too.

5. RGB Curves

This has been in Photoshop for ages, but finally Lightroom allows you to change the individual colour channels separately. No more RGB only, you can now tweak Red, Green and Blue separately. 

And here's a bonus like: Lossy DNG. You can make your archive much smaller with little drop in quality and tweakablity by converting to DNG, using 'Lossy DNG'.

Sean has made a film for PT4U on Lightroom 4 BETA to see the film click HERE