Version 4 of Adobe's popular Lightroom hit the streets a few weeks ago. While the feature list isn't extensive, it thankfully lacks padding (new yellow button somewhere!). The public beta took the wind out of any surprises but the release was highly anticipated for a number of new features: GPS tagging in the new Map module, book creation and export, video file support and basic clip editing.

Another big feature was the downgraded price tag: Lightroom 4 is now half the price of version 3; $149 is sweet for an application this powerful (the upgrade price is $79). The motivation for this change was clear. Apple, on a price-cutting binge of their Mac App Store professional apps, dropped the price of Aperture 3 down to $80. That's still almost half as cheap as Adobe's Lightroom but there is no longer a demo for Aperture, so you have more risk involved in making that purchase. Anyway, Apple's selling hardware, not apps, so I don't fault Adobe for failing to match Aperture's shareware-like price point.

Test Hardware

17" quad-core 2.5GHz MacBook Pro Sandy Bridge 2011 16GB RAM Vertex Turbo SSD system disk + 720GB HDD working disk Radeon 6770M 1GB OS X 10.7.3



Dual hexacore Mac Pro 2.66GHz Westmere Xeon 2010

24GB RAM



OWC Mercury Elite 6GB 120GB on PCIx SAS card system disk + 2TB striped RAID working disk



Radeon 5870 1GB



OS X 10.7.3

New and updated features

Video support

Lightroom 3 had very limited video file support and I complained about it in previous reviews. Your videos would be recognized on import and they'd get a poster frame, but they would have to be played externally. Version 4 adds playback for a wide variety of formats—it's no VLC but it supports more than enough to cover digital camera video formats of all stripes. In a surprise move, Adobe added some basic editing features that should up the bar of what's expected of a program handling video. You can trim clips non-destructively by clicking the gear icon in the player:

What's more impressive is that you can do some balance and tone tweaks on video footage within the Library module and get feedback in real time (even on 1080p footage). The system requirements don't list any GPU specs for this, so it's not based on CUDA or OpenCL from what I can tell. On my MacBook Pro, it used very little CPU resources for playback, after doing an initial pre-caching. The list of editable adjustments for video is more limited than with RAW or JPEG pics, but it's still enough to do some drastic tonal and color tweaks:

Videos can be shared via Facebook and Flickr. It would be nice if YouTube and Vimeo were supported out of the box but I'm pretty sure there are plug-ins out there for these already. It will be interesting to see how much video stuff Adobe adds to Lightroom in the future. I can see their excellent warp stabilizer from After Effects being useful for hand-held video footage, but I doubt they'll be giving this stuff away on the cheap.

Adjustment updates

Lightroom 4 has rejigged the Tone section of the basic adjustment sliders in an effort to make tonal adjustments clearer and improve dynamic range adjustments.

Lightroom 3's adjustments panel:

Lightroom 4's:

Since "Recovery" is ambiguous, "Fill Light" is a little misleading. "Brightness" recalls the days when brightness adjustments were a gain slider that just added white, Adobe's made a panel that cuts the luminance spectrum into more literal and understandable divisions. This makes it easier to do faux-HDR tonal control to regain highlight and shadow regions that are nearly clipped. Here's a shot that should help show this in practice:

After hitting Auto and doing some tweaks, it looks much better, with very nice falloff in areas that were almost clipped above:

It still needs some localized adjustments of the figures but it's a very good start.

Since I was suspicious of this being just a reorganization of sliders and not an actual improvement in Lightroom's tonal manipulation, I tried the get the same result with Lightroom 3:

Obviously not as good. Apart from the washed out look, the sky is patchy and transitions are harder in the recovered areas. It looks like Adobe's made some real progress with this, in both quality and ease of use.

Local adjustments updates

Lightroom had robust localized edits for a while now and version 4 adds some more filters to the bag of brushable and graduated tricks. You can now do white balance, noise reduction, and moiré on a localized basis:

Some people may wonder about the need for localized white point adjustment, but this quickly came in handy for me. I was making a blog post about swapping out the MacBook Pro's Superdrive for an HD caddy and this pic, with its mix of natural light from the window and tungsten light from above, posed a problem:

With a graduated white point, I neutralized the gradual yellow cast towards the left:

Call me a fan of this one.

Changes to auto-correction of chromatic aberration

Lightroom's lens-profile based correction is brilliant but the profile-based chromatic aberration fix was prone to error when many variables were added in. The profile-based chromatic aberration correction is now gone and chromatic aberration detection is now evaluative. We'll see how this fared in our RAW conversion tests.

Listing image by Photograph by Thomas Hawk