Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4 (Mac/PC)

Adobe Lightroom 4.0 (Mac/PC)The sliders are far more intuitive to use. I particularly like the ease of water marking for images. Being a Pro photographer I need to protect my images from copyright abuse. Simple watermarking for client proofing is so easy to set up.

I have a plethora of pre-sets I have gathered over the years and I'm happy to say all have been imported without any problems. I made the transition from Lightroom 2 without any drama and within minutes was back in the swing using LR4.
At the same time I purchased a new IMac and made the full transition. Initially I was at a cross roads as making such a big jump. It's been totally unfounded. I have both PC and Mac versions of LR and found them both identical. Though I do prefer the ease of magic mouse for the brush settings. Anyways back to LR4. When I first started out in Digital photography I had major problems sorting "keepers" and struggled to sort out dead shots. LR4 library is far easier to group and move. If your just starting out in Photography and your like I was on my very first wedding shoot I used to shoot off something like 1000 shots per wedding and then spend hours and hours filtering keepers and kill shots. With LR 4 it's a doddle.
Though, with experience now I now shoot approx. 300 shots per wedding and find file management is so much easier. The correction of images is better and I never find myself going to Photoshop any more. All post editing is done in Lightroom. Its simple to use, the layout is fantastic and I'm very happy with the product. The version from Amazon is both PC/Mac and so you will have no problems with either.

I had downloaded the demo version from Adobe site direct and this gave me 30 days to trial before you by, I would recommend this method. It's not everybody's cup of tea. When my LR4 arrived I simple started LR4 opened the box and input the adobe serial number and whalla! Its fully activated and you can officially register your copy. Amazon is very well priced and cheaper than than most sellers. I was fully informed as to delivery dates and pleased to say it hit me 3 days before the advised delivery date.

If you wish to know more about Adobe Lightroom 4 Google Julianne Kost and watch her reviews and how to videos. She is an Adobe evangelist who knows the product inside out.

I have been a photographer for many years now, cutting my teeth in a black and white dark room way back in the 80's. Over the years I've moved on to digital, as probably the majority of photographers have nowadays. But there has always been something missing, Photoshop never really gave photographs that darkroom feeling, the ability to tweak a photograph quite the same way you would have done in a darkroom. Well, Lightroom changes that, I'd tried version 3 and was impressed and when the Beta version of 4 came out I was so impressed with it I bought a copy as soon as it was available. It may not improve your composition, but then that's down to you isn't it ;-) It will however breath a bit of life into photographs you may have originally thought worthless, the ability to change every possible level of exposure, white balance, saturation.... the list goes on and one makes it an essential piece of kit for photographers in my opinion.

Ive uploaded a few before/after images to go with this review - click the 'View and share related images' Amazon link near the product image (top of the page).

The big changes (and potential pitalls) in this release are

Improved (and easier to use) tonal control via a new process engine.
If you update your image to the latest process engine, the LR3 sliders are replaced by a simpler set of sliders more relevant to photographers: you can now alter shadow levels via a single slider for example (something I now use a LOT - its really useful for visually separating the main subject from the background).

Better highlight handling.
You are much less likely to have (or create) burnt highlights, and its easier to fix highlights if the original RAW has them. This affects many other features in the application. For example, the clarity slider is much improved because it now has a fuller dynamic range to work with (I often find it better to increase clarity rather than contrast, because clarity inreases both detail and contrast, whereas the contrast slider increases contrast but loses detail).

The adjustment brush tool now works with more properties.
Best of the bunch is ability to add selective noise reduction. Maybe not an issue for high end full frame users, but will certainly be a boon for enthusiasts with noisier APS-C digital cameras.
One great use of the new adjustment brush is that you can now bring up the brightness of underexposed areas AND at the same time give them more noise reduction. In LR3 (which only has a global noise reduction control) you simply can't do this because overexposing shadow areas creates lots of noise in the same areas.
Selective noise reduction also has a many 'thinking out of the box' applications. One of my favorite such non-standard uses is skin retouching: adding lots of NR to skin areas is a fantastic trick for smoothing it: it gets rid of small detail (micro-blemishes) without affecting larger detail (variation in tone, highlights, etc).
What may be more useful for the newer high ISO, high resolution cameras (e.g. D800, EOS 5D MkIII, both with >20MP) is that you can also correct for moire using the adjustment brush (NB - I have only tried this with a few 24MP Sony A77 files: I more often use a 12MP camera so can't fully test the moire feature).

Soft proofing
AKA print proofing - see what your images will look like in reduced print gamut.

Support for video.

Support for Intous 5 touch (NB - tested on Windows 7 only). With my new Intous 5 touch, I can scroll around and move sliders with my finger and zoom in/out with a two finger 'pinch' (NB - it also works for Photoshop CS5). Even though I suspect this support is being provided by Microsoft rather than Adobe, this is still a cool feature for any Wacom user!

Various 'fluff' features
- Book module (turn your photos into a pdf book or a ready for print format via 'Blurb' website)
- Geo tagging

Bad points

For users with previous versions of LR, be aware that LR 4 uses a new process engine. Adobe say 'the changes may vary from minor to significant' but are not specific. I can say from early experience, the change is for the better if you are importing images that were edited in previous versions of LR only ('better' can be subjective, but the histogram clearly shows a more ideal exposure level across most images), or are straight-from-camera RAW files. If they have been edited in Photoshop at all, then the new process engine will screw up the image, requiring manual rework (esp if you used dodge/burn in PS - i.e. most retouching!). Be very careful of blanket changing your existing LR3 library to the new process if you roundtrip to photoshop in your workflow. Note that by default, Lightroom will use Process version 3 for your LR3 images (so your old LR 3 images will look the same in LR 4 until you update them to the new LR 4 process)... however you will need to update your old LR3 files to process version 4 to use the new LR4 features.

New slider controls take a bit of getting used to if you are more used to LR3

Limited effects when using video (you can't do to a video everything you can do to an image).

No longer compatible with XP. Yeah, I know XP is an old OS, but a lot of photographers I know tend to be pretty old school in their hardware, so may be an issue. If you are still using XP however, you are probably also using a 32 bit OS. Lightroom becomes much less crash prone and faster if you switch to a 64 bit system, so you may want to take the plunge with a double Windows7/Lightroom4 upgrade if you are still on XP.
Doing so will also allow you to upgrade your memory to 8Mb, wich is a significant performance change: I recall moving from 32 bit/4Mb to 64 bit/8Mb with LR3 was a world of difference - LR almost becomes a different application!

Lightroom 4 seems to require more processing power than Lightroom 3 in some situations. In particular, Photos with lots of adjustment brush strokes seem to pause for a long time (10s) on opening with my Q6600 quad core processor at 100% load. Not really a big issue (nothing ever crashes, this is totally understandable because the LR4 adjustment brush simply does more, and hopefully this is not even seen on faster i5/i7 CPUs) but worth noting if you find Lightroom 3 a little slow - Lightroom 4 will be slower.

Conclusion: Is it worth it?

At the release asking price (just about a two figure sum), I would say its certainly worth it if you have just bought a new digital camera especially if it supports RAW. Without something like Lightroom, you are just not making the most use of your camera.

For the existing user, I would also say it's certainly worth it. As of release, LR is pitched at a *very* low price point for updaters. The additional features make it value for money, although Photoshop users should note that the new LR process engine doesnt seem to play well with previous LR-version images that are Photoshop edited files.

For photographers that currently use CameraRAW/Photoshop/Bridge, I'd give LR4 a whirl given it is currently at such a low price. The cool things about LR over Photoshop are:
1. All edits are non destructive in LR: you can *always* move forward/back in the edit history, and the original image is always available (even after a save and reload).
2. LR is simply quicker in terms of workflow. Even if you know Photoshop well (as do I), LR shaves hours off the workflow because in LR you wil not be spending hours creating layers full of masks just to do a simple eye/skin retouch!

Hardware and Fair disclosure
Ran LR4 on a 8GB Windows 7 system (that also had a previous LR3 library and LR3 installation). Camera: Mid level Sony APS-C DSLR.
I have not used the Mac version of LR4 at all.
This review is mostly based on final beta, although I have had about a day's hands-on with the final release candidate before writing this review.