Photo book creation lets photographers design coffee table book layouts, complete with proofing and ready to send to the printer. This was a feature that previously had some Lightroom users jumping over to Aperture just to use, but no longer. The big new selling point for photographers is photo book creation. There is also enhanced sharing integration with some social media sites. This is aided by a new Map module accessible at the top of the interface. With the increased use of smart phone cameras and online social media and photo services, like Flickr and Facebook, Lightroom 4 now lets you organize images based on location information embedded in the image metadata. Finally, there are new selective brushes to control such options as white balance within areas of the picture. In other words, you have more control than merely desaturating the image. This lets you use eight color channels to control the tonal qualities of the black-and-white image. There’s also advanced black-and-white conversion. If you work with camera raw images, Lightroom uses the same raw processing engine as Photoshop. Highlight/shadow recovery is critical in digging out detail in bright skies and dark areas in an image. The biggest changes have been made in highlight/shadow recovery and noise reduction. Naturally, all changes are non-destructive, so your original photo is always unaltered. If you open existing photos that have been processed and catalogued in previous versions of Lightroom, you have the option of sticking with the old correction or update the file. Image processing and color science have been changed in Lightroom 4. Let’s first look at the improvements for photography. For now, Lightroom offers the more advanced video features and, of course, is a cross-platform application. Both are powerful tools and each new version tends to leapfrog that of the competitor. Adobe Photoshop Lightroom competes directly with Apple Aperture and each has its loyal proponents among photographers. Lightroom is the ideal application to store, organize, adjust, crop and prepare stills for video editing. Although Lightroom is primarily a photographer’s tool, it is also indispensable for video producers and editors who have to deal with a large volume of photographs, such as when producing documentaries that are based on archival images. For the fourth iteration of Lightroom, Adobe has enhanced the processing capabilities and added features to aid photographers with handling modern photographic challenges, such as the integration of video.

Adobe lightroom 4