Lightroom 4

Books make Lightroom that much more interesting to me. I'll play with it tonight after work. (Right now, Aperture's book tools are driving me batty, more bugs than in its previous version, no new features, ugh!)

Thanks for the heads up.
Though the new version is almost ten times the size of LR 3.
LR 3 takes up 108 MB, LR 4 966 MB.
Not that much of a problem with today's HDDs and even SSDs, but more to load into the RAM I suppose.

System requirements, for those who (like me ) couldn't find it straight away on the Adobe Labs site:

Lightroom 4 Beta:

Multicore Intel processor with 64-bit support
Mac OS X v10.6.8 or v10.7
2GB of RAM
1GB of available hard-disk space
1024x768 display
DVD-ROM drive
Internet connection required for Internet-based services

Whereas Lightroom 3 is:

Intel processor
Mac OS X v10.5 or v10.6
2GB of RAM
1GB of available hard-disk space
1,024x768 display
CD-ROM drive

Not a bad jump at all, though as usual it remains to be seen how feasible it is to run on those minimum requirements.

nice, but no offense, the books and maps are already part of Aperture since version 3.0 ...

otherwise I will have a look at LR 4.. let's see what else is new..

I'm going to give this a try, was waiting for Aperture 4.0 to be released so I can upgrade to Lion (no point buying Aperture 3.0 at this stage).

FourCandles said:

Not a bad jump at all, though as usual it remains to be seen how feasible it is to run on those minimum requirements.

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In the past it worked fine on older hardware, wondering if its too much for my old Macbook.

Hoping for some more improvements in the develop module, books and maps less bothered about to be honest.

I saw one comment that says the beta version is sluggish compared to the current release version of Lightroom. Of course, 4.0 is still in beta, so performance is likely not optimized yet. I wouldn't judge it on speed yet.

simsaladimbamba said:

Thanks for the heads up.
Though the new version is almost ten times the size of LR 3.
LR 3 takes up 108 MB, LR 4 966 MB.
Not that much of a problem with today's HDDs and even SSDs, but more to load into the RAM I suppose.

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I doubt it's loading more into RAM. The extra is probably book templates and stuff like that.

I can only hope that they not only include a book making feature but calendars as well.

iPhoto has this ability but for some wacky reason apple decided that it shouldn't be in Aperture. I mean they added faces to aperture but didn't think calendars would be useful. [/rant]

This is great news for Aperture users - the timing's about right (I think Aperture was last updated in Feb 2010?).
Apple should be about ready for a new release, and the interesting thing is that a lot of Lightroom's new features have been part of Aperture 3 for some time now. Adobe may have improved or streamlined such features, but there's nothing really new there (although the video processing looks interesting).
Aperture may well enhance it's already rich feature set, possibly adding similar video processing etc. but there will also be the chance of seeing new tools that LR hasn't or won't deliver. Layers anyone? iCloud integration?
The thing is, Aperture users are already used to an incredible workflow management and processing application built to work closely with OSX in a way that LR can't.
I read in another forum that LR4 is now going to "Spank Aperture" whatever that means.... This isn't a Lightroom vs Aperture dual - if you use one over the other, good luck to you. Personally, Aperture with a few updated features (As talked over Here) will be pretty much the perfect Professional Photo Raw Capture DAM software I could need. A few tweaks now and we're there.

jadot - your post seems to ignore the good number of things that Lightroom does already (version 3) that Aperture does not, or does not do as well.

Although some of these extra LR4 features are nice, for me and many other's it's the underlying image processing that's attractive about Lightroom. I can edit videos and desktop-publish books elsewhere.

Aperture needs better quality processing, better sharpening (re-sharpening after resize on export is a must!), better noise processing. How about lens profiles and distortion removal? Needs that too, if it's to catch up with the last generation of Lightroom.

Aperture does look very pretty - but it risks being moved into a pro/am niche, while Lightroom goes for more of a pro audience.

mofunk said:

Beta was just released today.

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Thanks for the head's up. I've recently realized that Aperture's management of referenced files is quite bad, and not being able to send photos straight into another library makes it insurmountable... Might switch.

The Fill and Recovery sliders are now called Shadow and Highlight and have new options. You can now have noise reduction applied *only* to the shadows instead of changing it globally. Brushes also now can do more local adjustments (e.g. noise reduction and color temperature). So says the internet; I haven't downloaded the beta myself.

I'm not super impressed with what I've seen thus far but I think that I will download it and give it a try.

I'm looking forward to the Aperture 4 release though. I'm really hoping that it makes working with multiple libraries more seamless.

initialsBB said:

Thanks for the head's up. I've recently realized that Aperture's management of referenced files is quite bad, and not being able to send photos straight into another library makes it insurmountable... Might switch.

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Purely out of curiosity, how does Lightroom handle this? In Aperture you can group your shots to a folder, export as library and import/merge in the other library but i haven't seen Lightrooms option in this ..

Downloaded 4 beta to test and its good, but coming from Aperture it looks like a big learning curve....

IMHO.. at least for an old man like me.

flosseR said:

coming from Aperture it looks like a big learning curve...

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Tested it for a few hours just now. It's not so bad actually. You just have to accept that it is more 'structured' in it's GUI and workflow. It has some way more powerful stuff than Aperture, like the adjustment brushes which are awesome, and lens profiles that do a great job of getting rid of distortion. I've read Lightroom handles noise much better as well but didn't dig any deeper.

I don't like it's library view though, I find managing photos in Aperture much better but that's my opinion. I'm actually probably going to go back to a managed Aperture library and keep it simple.

If I were a pro photographer I can imagine using Lightroom. It seems like it handles job batches really nicely. I can imagine exporting a series of masters from Aperture to treat them with Lightroom for example.

Let's hope Apple get their act together for Aperture 4 because it's a great photo manager, just needs better editing tools.

initialsBB said:

Let's hope Apple get their act together for Aperture 4 because it's a great photo manager, just needs better editing tools.

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And better integration with Photoshop (e.g. support for Smart Objects).

OK, I finally downloaded the beta and threw the worst I had at it. I imported a photo that I had completely scrapped because it was going to be too much work to get what I wanted out of the one raw exposure that I had (a scene with a vast dynamic range that really required multiple exposures that I could not get because of the crazy shooting conditions, which I won't bore you with). I had already tried my usual tricks in Lightroom 3 and in Photoshop and ultimately said the heck with it, this photo just isn't going anywhere. Thanks to LR4 Beta's new editing features, I was able to get nice photo out of it in about five minutes. I'm not kidding, the results are nothing like what LR3 could do, and I'm pretty handy with that program. I'm over the moon with these new changes in LR4 right now. Homerun for Adobe here!

On the negative side, I'm scratching my head a bit about their changes to the way LR handles Chromatic aberration. Gone are the sliders for the different ranges of aberration. Instead there is a single check box, which so far has been right on the mark in removing all CA, but I refuse to believe that there won't be exceptions. What about photos that require different settings at the edges than at the center? How can they be serious about removing manual control of CA? Am I missing something?

initialsBB said:

Tested it for a few hours just now. It's not so bad actually. You just have to accept that it is more 'structured' in it's GUI and workflow. It has some way more powerful stuff than Aperture, like the adjustment brushes which are awesome, and lens profiles that do a great job of getting rid of distortion. I've read Lightroom handles noise much better as well but didn't dig any deeper.

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ok now you peaked my interest because the adjustment brushes and the way you brush and over brush adjustment in aperture are second to none in comparison to what lightroom had.. can you over brush an adjustment with another adjustment?

//f

flosseR said:

can you over brush an adjustment with another adjustment?

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You've always been able to do that in Lightroom.

flosseR said:

ok now you peaked my interest because the adjustment brushes and the way you brush and over brush adjustment in aperture are second to none in comparison to what lightroom had.. can you over brush an adjustment with another adjustment?

//f

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Of course you can overlay different brush effects in LR. Was it ever any other way? I never used Aperture 3 enough to get the hang of its brushes there, but how it works in LR3 (and now 4) is you have different pins that control different brush strokes (each pin has its own effects settings), and those pins all work cumulatively--so where their brush strokes overlap, you have the effects of both pins applied. You can always select any pin and change its effects at any time without changing any of the other pins.

Now LR4 even has the ability to brush in color temperature, noise reduction, and highlight/shadow adjustments (an evolution of the former Fill Light and Recovery options, which were not brushable in LR3).

What does Aperture have in its brush features that LR lacks?

Maps! Great.

No longer will I have to look enviously over at my girlfriend geotagging photos in no time at all in Aperture, while I laboriously geotag with Google Maps and GPS Photolinker before importing into Lightroom!

No word on face recognition. I'm pretty sure from LR 2 to 3 there were some features in 3 that weren't in the Beta, so who knows.

imahawki said:

No word on face recognition.

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Please no, Face recognition has turned iPhoto into a bloated piece of crap.