As promised, this post is a more in depth look at the changes up-coming in Lightroom version 4. The Beta has been out for about a month giving a lot of folks plenty of time to test and put it through it’s paces. Since this is a Beta version, there are likely to be some problems. Watching the forum, the major complaint right now is speed. It seems that this Beta version is very sluggish – surprise! What you have to remember is this a Beta software, meaning there is still a good portion of debug code in the software which will – you guessed it – slow it down!
Anyway, what I wanted to address in this post was changes specific to the develop module. Now the develop module is nothing new, but the new “Process 2012″ portion of the develop module causes some rather significant changes in the user interface of the develop module. Notably the sliders are all zeroed in the center and have a range from -100 to +100. This can take some time to get used to because for example, in LR3 the blacks slider ranged from 0 to 100 and increasing this slider would increase the amount of black clipping. In LR4, to increase the amount of black clipping you will move the slider to the left (to a negative number), to reduce the black clipping you will move the slider to the right (to a positive number). Small movements make a big difference as the sliders are sensitive. Another change in the adjustments is the Fill Light slider is gone, replaced by the Shadows slider which does a much better job of opening up the shadows in your images.
Another notable change is that for the adjustment brush and gradient tools (adjustment brush sliders shown here), all of the basic development module sliders are available with the addition of a few other sliders, including the noise sliders. What does this mean, well for starters it means that you can use the adjustment brush to change the white balance of only the portion of the image where the brush is applied. Additionally, you can apply area specific noise adjustments. For example, if you use the adjustment brush to open up the shadows in a specific portion of your image and find an increase in the noise in this same area, you can now adjust the noise along with the shadows adjustment to balance things out.
Need to warm up just a small portion of your image, now you can using the adjustment brush and the Temp and Tint sliders. Want to adjust the really dark areas of your image, apply an adjustment brush and use the shadows slider in combination with the other sliders to fine tune the look you want. The possibilities are endless.
The image at the beginning of this post was processed entirely in Lightroom 4 Beta 1. This new version of Lightroom gives a lot more control of specific parts of an image to the photographer, and is a welcome enhancement.
