I’ve now been using Lightroom 4 for a couple of weeks, and although there are many things I’ve yet to find out, generally I think it is a very useful improvement over the previous version, though I’m hoping it won’t be long before 4.1 is out – and a release candidate is already available. There are a few bugs, but it generally works pretty well. If you are already a Lightroom user, you will almost certainly have upgraded already to LR4, but if not there is no reason to wait. If you are a photographer and don’t use LR, LR4 means you are missing out more.
LR4 now does almost everything that the digital photographer could want and has become considerably more affordable, while Photoshop becomes more expensive every time I look at the prices. Very few photographers now really need it rather than the more reasonably priced Elements and if you think you do you are spending far too much time on post-processing and not enough on taking pictures :-) Though I still find my ancient Photoshop 7 easier to use than the much flashier latest Elements. For me it’s a simple basic sharp knife compared to some fancy new toolset that tries to make things easy for those who don’t understand what they are doing. But if I had to I would get used to Elements and get the same results.
LR does take a little time and effort to learn, and that has put some photographers off, but I’d have to agree with another reviewer who noted that their were only two classes of photographers who didn’t like it and use it. Those who had never tried it and those who had played with it for a short time and given up without making the effort.
Perhaps I’d add just a little to that. LR does need reasonably powerful hardware – the difference when I moved from a five year old 32 bit system to my current 64bit machine with roughly 3 times the usable RAM was noticeable, and the change to a good USB 3.0 card reader made a truly huge difference in the time taken to ingest a card full of images into the catalogue – from an hour or two down to perhaps 10 minutes. So if you need to file on location with an underpowered notebook, there are better choices such as Photo Mechanic, though you will probably still want to have LR on you main machine.I’m not sure that the results I’m getting are any better on average than those from LR3, but certainly it is taking me less time to process them, with considerably fewer images needing local modifications (which can be very time-consuming.) The most important changes for me are in the Develop module, where the sliders now work rather differently, even where the names are the same – which takes some getting used to.
LR3 had an Exposure slider and a Brightness one, and LR4’s Exposure slider seems to work rather more like the Brightness in LR3, increasing the brightness of the image without pushing many more pixels beyond the end of the histogram.
The good news is that they have got rid of ‘Fill Light’ and ‘Highlight Recovery’ neither of which really worked properly. Fill light seldom gave good results at values of over 20 and almost never greater than 30, while Highlight Recovery was always best kept at zero (with local highlight areas being taken out by suitable local treatment.) I even feel a little cheated however, as it had taken me a lot of time and effort to find ways of getting around these limitations and the new version lets anyone do the job properly!
As with LR3, you should work from top to bottom in the Basic panel. The first step seems to be to get the colour balance right, and then mid-tones right (and particularly flesh tones) using Exposure and Contrast. While in LR3 you then had to burn down excessive highlights locally and get the required shadow detail with a combination of the Fill and local brightness, you can usually get a usable result with the Highlights and Shadows sliders and adjusting the White and Black sliders to fill the whole span of the histogram. The Auto button actually does the job for you more often than not, certainly much more often than in LR3. Occasionally some local adjustment is still necessary, and often you will in any case want to do a little dodging and burning.
When using the brush or the gradient tool there are some very useful new options – colour temperature and noise, and one that will probably attract any buyers of the Nikon 800E, Moire. The colour temperature is a really useful change, enabling you to deal with images where mixed colour lighting is otherwise a tricky problem.
Also in the Develop module there are welcome changes in the Lens correction, with a better removal of Chromatic Aberration, and when set this this works automatically on any image and isn’t dependent on having a lens profile as in LR3. It’s particularly worth importing old images taken with my compact cameras and using this on them, as well as the Defringe box on the Manual panel of the Lens Correction set to all edges. Along with a little noise reduction it really does improve them, and you can make them almost look as if they were taken with a larger camera.
The Tone Curve is also improved, with much greater flexibility, though it isn’t something I use much. My standard import preset used to give it a little tweak of extra contrast. but in LR4 it defaults to ‘Linear’. When I update images I’ve processed before to the new 2012 process they often benefit from just a little more contrast than this provides, though not quite as much as that provided by going into the Tone Curve panel and choosing ‘Medium Contrast’. If you select this and then adjust the curve to get the effect you want it is possible to save this as a User development preset, but I can’t find a way to add it to the options in the Tone Curve section itself.
There are many more new features (and existing ones of LR3) that I’ve still to investigate. I don’t yet do much printing from LR, but if I did the soft proofing would certainly be useful, and it may be good enough for me to switch to using this in place of Photoshop. Something I am going to try is the new Book module, which can produce either a Blurb book or a PDF. It looks a very easy way to produce image-based books, and appears to handle captions and titles better than Blurb’s Booksmart, as well as allowing you to print a proof copy without an annoying watermark. But for anything with much text – or where you want true flexibility of design – InDesign will continue to be the answer.
In the UK at least it’s actually slightly cheaper to buy LR on disk than download it, a small issue I think Adobe should address. I’m not even quite sure about the legality involved in charging it’s UK customers VAT at the higher Irish rate, and certainly I’ve had to pay the UK vat rate on some downloads from countries with lower tax rates. But surely they could supply software from a UK server if necessary. Personally I like to have a disk on my shelf, much handier should I have to re-install on this or a replacement computer, and would expect at least a small discount on downloaded software.