Lightroom 4 Beta

After

Adobe released Lightroom 4 Beta today and I've been busy playing with it and running it through a few tests.

This is a quick and dirty processing example showing the power of Lightroom 4 Beta's dynamic range control. One of the things that both DxO Optics and Capture One has improved in the recent years is control over this. I'm pleased to say that Lightroom 4 has caught up significantly in this area.

Before

Recovery/Light was how Lightroom 3 handled this, but this has been changed significantly in LR4 with several new controls that may as well replace HDR imaging.

I used one of my commercial images that I originally shot for HDR. The after example is a single exposure and I like the results much more than using HDR software.

Geometry correction and Hot Pixel noise are still areas that needs improvement in LR4, but other than that, it's a significant improvment and looking forward to the release version.

I spent all in all maybe 10 minutes of tweaking on this image... way faster than using HDR software or layer masking.