Free beta of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4

Available as a free public download from Adobe Labs, the beta of the fourth incarnation of the Lightroom photography workflow tool allows photographers to quickly import, manage, enhance and showcase their images.

With the final release of Lightroom 4 expected in early 2012, the beta is available as a preview that features refined technology for superior shadow and highlight processing, expanded management capabilities including enhanced DSLR video support and the ability to create photo books from within Lightroom.

All new basic tonal adjustment controls extract the entire dynamic range from cameras for stunning shadow details and highlights. The software features additional local adjustment controls, including Noise Reduction, Moire and White Balance.

New native video support gives photographers the capability to play, trim and extract frames from video clips shot on DSLRs, point-and-shoot cameras and smartphones. Many standard Lightroom image adjustment controls can also be applied to video clips and adjusted videos can be exported as a H.264 file or published directly to Facebook or Flickr.

“Giving early customer access to new versions of Lightroom has helped our team deliver an outstanding battle-tested product that really stands up to the demands of photographers worldwide,” said Winston Hendrickson, vice president of Digital Imaging Products, Adobe. “The much anticipated release of Lightroom 4 beta continues this tradition and shows how much Adobe values customer insights into photography workflows.”

Lightroom 4 beta provides photographers with the tools to create photo books with rich text controls and a variety of easy-to-use templates, as well as a direct link for photo book creation from within the new Book module. Also, a new intuitive Map module displays images already assigned a location, provides location-tagging controls and saved locations for effortless assignment of a photographer’s common locations.

In the Develop module, the addition of soft proofing helps photographers tune images in a destination colour space to ensure prints and Web content look their best. In addition, customers can now email images directly from Lightroom using an email account of their choice including Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4 beta is available immediately as a free download on both Windows and Mac at http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/. Customers can submit feedback on the community powered feedback site. Users can also connect with the Lightroom team directly on Facebook, via Twitter or on the Adobe Lightroom blog. For Lightroom how-to videos, visit http://www.youtube.com/lightroom.

System Requirements for the software

Macintosh

• Multicore Intel processor with 64-bit support
• Mac OS X v10.6.8 (Snow Leopard) or v10.7 (Lion)
• 2GB of RAM
• 1GB of available hard-disk space
• 1,024×768 display
• DVD-ROM drive
• Internet connection required for Internet-based services

Windows

• Intel Pentium 4 or AMD Athlon 64 processor
• Microsoft Windows Vista with Service Pack 2 or Windows 7 with Service Pack 1
• 2GB of RAM
• 1GB of available hard-disk space
• 1,024×768 display
• DVD-ROM drive
• Internet connection required for Internet-based services