Adobe has released a public beat of Lightroom 4 onto Adobe labs. The full press release is on the Wetpixel front page here:

http://wetpixel.com/i.php/full/adobe-relea...ghtroom-4-beta/

But I have already found a couple of very cool features. The huge one is local color temperature (white balance) adjustment. Finally, you can correct weird color cast locally, rather than having to duplicate layers and mask in PS. The noise algorithm has been tweaked again, and seems better, and I think the sharpening too. The clarity slider's effects seem more marked. I haven't tried printing yet, but I am going to guess that the soft proofing feature is going to be good.

It is still missing any form of layers type editing.

Being able to export directly to email is great too (I know you could do it before, but it was a work-around)

Adam

I would suspect that is to keep PS a necessary tool. But also because once you start adding the layer editing you need to add a whole host of other features to support it, something that may be outside the scope of the original intent of LightRoom.

Maybe the UK version of LR3 is different from the US version? I have been doing local WB for quite some time with LR3. It is particularly useful for UWP. For example when shooting the near the stream bottom with flash the bottom nearest the camera tends to be exposed more and with a different color so I typically do a bit of minus exposure with a color ~ complimentary to that used for correcting the rest of the scene with the gradient adjustment.

Thus far LR4 looks like less of an upgrade then LR3 was.

Local color (hue/saturation/luminance) correction was possible via the HSL sliders, or using the brush tool to some extent, but not local white balance (color temperature). This is a new feature, and if you try the beta I think you will be amazed at the results!

Julieanne Kost on some of the differences:



Adam

A good point. As well there are a few other new sliders for localized adjust. Kelvin temperatures do not necessarily correspond to the corrections needed for UWP. I generally use a combination of temperature and the tint slider to get the desired effect when fixing the whole scene (non-local). One is then mixing on two separate color axes. I am quite comfortable using the single color in combination with intensity that one can get when clicking on the white box with an X down at the bottom of the local adjustment list (which was also in LR3 per previous post). For example one can generate a color similar to the magic filters and make the effect stronger or weaker. However there is the option of using temperature and tint as well.