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+<p>Adobe has released the first public beta of what will become Photoshop Lightroom 4, a major upgrade of the Lightroom line. This release sees Adobe primarily focusing on improving the Lightroom interface, particularly the Develop Module which is now easier and faster to use and features more intuitive set of controls.</p>
+
+<p>Lightroom 4 beta is a free download available from the <a href="http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/lightroom4/">Adobe Labs website</a>, but do keep in mind that this is beta software intended for testing. Be sure to use duplicates of images that have been backed up elsewhere when testing Lightroom 4.</p>
+
+<p>The first thing you'll notice on launching the new Lightroom 4 is that it will ask you to create a new catalog. This partly so that you can run it alongside the production version (Lightroom 3.6) and partly because Lightroom has some new tricks up its sleeve, in particular, a new Map Module for adding and storing geodata. </p>
+
+<p>The Map Module only works with an internet connection and uses Google Maps, which you can use to add geodata just as you might through a web service like Flickr. Naturally, while that works it's a huge pain if you're working with a lot of images so Lightroom also supports importing track logs. For example, if your phone platform has an app that you use to log your image locations, Lightroom can read the data (provided the app can export it) and attatch it to your images. Of course if your camera records the geodata to directly to your images then Lightroom will use that info. Once you have the geodata added you can search images be location and view them on the map.</p>
+
+<p>Along with the geodata comes some new privacy settings for your images, including an option to ignore any geographic data Lightroom might find.</p>
+
+<p>The other entirely new menu item in Lightroom 4 is the Book options which does exactly what you think it does -- helps you layout and typeset a book for printing. The Book module works much like what you'll find in other software and online -- select your images, choose from a number of template and then start customizing. The difference with Lightroom is the level of customization possible, which includes everything from layouts to fonts to even the leading and kerning applied to fonts. Actual book printing is handled through <a href="http://blurb.com/">Blurb.com</a>.</p>
+
+<p>The other notable new feature worth mentioning before we dive into the revamped modules is that Lightroom 4 includes much improved support for videos. While Lightroom 3 can import and will maintain a record of your video locations, it lacks any way to do anything with your videos. Lightroom 4 steps up the video support, treating movies as just another image. That means you can adjust levels and make basic tweaks to your video directly in Lightroom 4 using most of the tools in the Quick Develop panel (except for Crop, Highlights, Shadows and Clarity which are disabled for video). There's nothing as powerful as what you'll find in Adobe Premiere, but it will work for serious photographers that occasionally dabble in video.</p>
+
+<h3>The Develop Module</h3>
+
+<p>The Develop Module is the heart of Lightroom and it's where most of the changes in Lightroom 4 have happened. At first glance the Develop Module looks about the same, but the basic development tools have been considerably reworked. Instead of the somewhat obscure tone sliders like Recovery, Fill Light and Brightness, Lightroom 4 has been reorganized to Highlights, Shadows, Whites and Blacks. Each slider controls exactly what its name suggests.</p>
+
+<p>Adobe has also changed the sliders so that all of the tone adjustments default to the middle. Drag the slider left and whichever effect you're using gets darker; drag it to the right and it gets lighter. It's a small change, but it makes adjusting images more intuitive and also makes it easier to see where you're at with a quick glance.</p>
+
+<p>Of course while the new controls may be more intuitive and somewhat easier to use that only matters if they're capable of the same or better results. In playing with them for a few days it's clear that they do, though the experience is not without a learning curve and sometimes the loss of the brightness slider is annoying (though Adobe assures me that Exposure covers the same ground, sometimes it doesn't feel that way).</p>
+
+<p>The new Highlights and Shadows sliders essentially do the work of recovery and Fill Light and in most situations do it much better. Highlights in particular is more useful than Recovery and actually lightens or darkens all your highlights, rather than washing out the middle highlights in kind of neutral gray color the way Recovery often did (this is particularly noticeable in images with snow, clouds, concrete or any other situation with a wide and subtle range of highlight tones).</p>
+
+<p>Where Highlights is more powerful than Recovery was, Shadows seems more constrained than Fill Light. Indeed in some image I tested it was hard to tell any effect at all with the Shadows adjustment until it was paired with the Blacks slider. However, the subtleness of Shadows makes it perfect for adjusting shadows in darker images where more subtly is called for. If you're just looking to create greater contrast look to the Blacks or Contrast adjustments. </p>
+
+<p>In the end Highlights and Shadows are not intended to be one-to-one replacements for Recovery and Fill Light; they're similar, but different enough that it takes some practice to get comfortable with them. However, after developing around 50 images in Lightroom 4 I found that I was able to produce better results than I had on the same images using Lightroom 3.</p>
+
+<p>[Note that, should you export some images from Lightroom 3 to test in Lightroom 4 you may not see the new sliders in the Develop Module. Instead you'll see a small exclamation point icon at the bottom right corner of the images window. Click that icon and Lightroom will offer to upgrade your images to the "current process." Once you've converted the images the new sliders will appear.]</p>
+
+<p>Lightroom 4's Develop Module also features better local adjustment tools, making it easier to apply adjustments to only select parts of images. For example graduated filters can now apply effects like noise reduction and moire. Both of those new filters are also available via the brush so you can brush noise reduction into say, only the shadow areas of your image. Similar local adjustments can be made using the new Highlights and Shadows as well as the Blacks and Whites.</p>
+
+<p>There are a number of other changes in the development panel -- for example the algorithms behind clarity slider have been updated to reduce halos -- but perhaps the most interesting is the ability to make Point Curve edits to individual RGB channels. Previously this sort of fine-grained tweaking necessitated a trip to Photoshop (or similar), but now you can tweak your RGB channels right in Lightroom.</p>
+
+<h3>Other Improvements</h3>
+
+<p>There are a number of small, but welcome changes in Lightroom 4 that solve some "paper cut" problems in previous releases. For example Lightroom 4 now has an option to email a photo. Strange that it took four revisions to get something so simple in, but it's there now. Another nice new change is the ability to hide the main menu items you don't need. Outside of verifying that it works for review purposes I've never used Lightroom's Web Module, so now I can stop it from taking up screen real estate -- handy considering that with the Book and Map menu items the menu is occupying more space than ever.</p>
+
+<p>Under the hood Adobe has made some changes to the DNG format that will affect anyone who opts to convert their images to DNG. The most significant change for Lightroom is something Adobe calls fast load data. Fast load data means that Adobe apps can display images faster using just the core data, without waiting for the entire set of image data to load. Adobe claims that images using fast load, load up to eight times faster. If you're worried about backwards or cross compatibility with other apps Adobe assured me that apps that don't understand fast load will still be able to process these images. The new fast load features is enabled by default.</p>
+
+<p>The second change to the DNG format is the addition of lossy compression. Given that part of the appeal of DNG (and more generally, Camera Raw) format is that it preserves all your data combined with the every plummeting price of storage it's hard to see why anyone would want lossy compression, but it's there if you do (the new lossy compression option is, thankfully, disabled by default).</p>
+
+<h3>Conclusion</h3>
+
+<p>Lightroom 4 looks to be the sort of update photographers can get behind, there are no major new features, but the basic toolset had been improved and new Develop Module in particular makes processing your images easier and faster. It might take a day or two to wrap your head around the changes in the tone adjustments, but once you do you won't want to go back. </p>
+
+<p>Indeed that's the biggest problem with this beta release -- it's a beta and much as I'd like to I'm not willing to entrust it with my actual library or new images just yet. However, Adobe tells Wired that the Lightroom 4 beta period will likely be somewhat shorter than the rather long Lightroom 3 beta test.</p>
+
+<p>Of course, given that the changes in Lightroom 4 are seemingly not as big as the move from Lightroom 2 to 3, it's worth asking whether or not Lightroom 4 will be worth the price of the upgrade. The answer will depend on your workflow and how much the improved tools improve your experience with it. For that reason I would suggest trying the beta now and spending some time with it before the final release rolls around later this year.</p>