Lightroom Beta 4

» 25 Sep 2006, 12:27pm in photography - 2 comments

Adobe last night release Beta 4 of its upcoming Lightroom software, now dubbed 'Adobe Photoshop Lightroom'. I installed the software within an hour of its release and was pleasantly surprised, and simultaneously disappointed, with the update.

One of the biggest problems with Beta 3 for the Windows PC was speed. Lightroom was just plain slow, and with Beta 4 Adobe seems to have addressed this issue. The interface itself is now responsive and smooth, and image operations like changing photos, adjustments, and zooming are all now significantly faster--not as fast as Capture One, but perhaps fast enough.

The GUI itself has had a minor makeover, to my applause, with interface widgets being made a dark grey and black colour, more similar now to Apple's Aperture. I think there is still room for improvement here, though, with more transparencies, overlays, movable/draggable components, which could let users customize their workspace to their liking.

These improvements notwithstanding, Lightroom still suffers from a glaring lack of a few basic editing tools, which forces me to export and edit every single image in Photoshop, a time-consuming (and memory-intensive) process.

- No healing/clone tool: Dust is a problem for SLRs; interchangeable lenses and moving components inside the camera allow tiny dust particles to get inside and then 'stick' to the sensor's antialias or IR filter, showing up as small, dark spots on the images. Simple to remove with Photoshop's spot healing brush, but Lightroom provides no such tool, making an export required whenever a spot is visible in an image (which is often).
- No lens distortion correction: A gruesome reality with nearly all lenses, especially wide- and ultra-wide angles, and in particular zoom lenses, is distortion. Photoshop provides a Lens Correction filter that makes it fast and easy to correct this, but of course, this requires an image export from Lightroom. Lightroom currently has handy (and essential) chromatic abberation and vignetting correction controls, similar to those in Photoshop, but not distortion correction. It would be really nice if you could also save lens profiles (a la PTLens), and automatically apply them based on the lens used, which is saved in the EXIF header. Adobe needs to add this feature before Lightroom can be considered a standalone product. Until then, most photogs will also need to purchase Photoshop (perhaps this is Adobe's moneybags strategy).
- Inadequate sharpening tool: A single slider to adjust sharpening amount is not nearly adequate, and the current tool produces obscene halos at edges when applied to the appropriate amount. At the very least, Lightroom should include the functionality provided by Photoshop's Unsharp Mask filter, or even better, the Smart Sharpen filter. Ideally they would take it beyond that, with capture and output sharpening, edge sharpening, luminance sharpening, and saveable profiles. Until this is improved, I have to edit every image in Photoshop to apply sharpening.

These are the three biggest omissions, in my opinion, based on a couple of months working with Beta 3 on my Newfoundland galleries. There are clearly others (magnifying glass/loupe, EXIF editor, HDR blending...), but these are the ones that affect me the most. If they don't make it into the final version of Lightroom, I can only hope that some keen developer out there creates plugins using the Lightroom SDK to handle these functions within the program.

With the dramatic speed increase, though, one major hurdle has been cleared and the program is much more useable for me. It will save me a lot of time when working on all the photos I've made in the past few months... I'm so far behind!

2 comments:

  • Sean: I'm running a Core 2 Duo at 3.6GHz with 2GB of corsair PC-8500 ram and LR4 is running so dog slow its totally unusable... I agree with your comments about the omissions- add noise reduction to the list. That loupe zoom that Aperture has is what will convert me to mac if Lightroom leaves it out. I have to weed and the quicker the better.
  • Christian: Hi mine Name it is Pinciuc too, I am suiss.

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