Playing with LR4 Beta

Late last week, I downloaded Adobe’s newest version of Lightroom (Lightroom 4 Beta).  Since it’s a beta version, it’s free to anyone who wants to try it and will work until they actually start selling the program (in March, I think).  Then, of course, you have to buy it.  Before downloading it, though, I watched some of the videos Adobe provided to see what was new.

To me, the most useful “new” feature is the changes they’ve made in the Develop module.  The old “Brightness” slider is gone, as is “Fill Light”.  Instead we now have 4 sliders that are labeled Highlights, Shadows, Whites, and Blacks.  Each of these sliders correspond to a very specific part of the histogram.  The idea, apparently, is to provide the user with a lot more control in adjusting tonalities.  The same sliders appear if you activate the “Brush” tool.  And they all are set at “0″ when you open an image.

In theory, this additional control should provide more “headroom” with respect to dynamic range.  In one of the videos, they pointed out that HDR-like effects could be achieved with a single image without blocked up shadows or blown highlights.  For the somewhat lazy among us, this would eliminate the need for multiple exposures, something very useful if you have movement within the frame.

OK.  That sounded like something worth trying.  So after doing the download, I needed to find an image that had the necessary ingredients for testing the new adjustment tools.  My choice turned out to be a photograph taken a couple of months ago down in Buttermilk State Park.  There’s a formation in the park known as “The Pillar”, a kind of tallish pile of sedimentary rock that was separated from the main gorge by weathering.  The problem I had on that particular day was positioning.  No matter where I placed the tripod, there  was a relatively bright sky at the top of the frame and deep shadows at the bottom.  So I elected to do multiple images (4 of them) that ranged from 1″ of exposure to 6″.  When I combined them in Photoshop and did the HDR conversion, I wasn’t real happy with the result.  It wound up looking too flat.  It just didn’t look like I remembered it.

So I decided to try it in LR4, using just the shortest exposure (1 second).  That image (unadjusted) is shown below.

The Pillar (1 sec. exp.)

Clearly, the shadows are blocked to a large extent and there are still blown highlights in the sky.  The highlights I could live with, but the shadows needed some serious help.  In LR3, you could add fill light or push the shadows slider up in the contrast curve or use the adjustment brush.  Or some combination of all 3.  The problem, at least in my experience, was the addition of significant noise in those shadows.  Even images taken at low ISO seemed vulnerable.  It never seemed to work all that well.

So I did it in LR4 on the 1 second exposure image.  And here’s the result.

The Pillar, Adjusted

The interesting thing is that this took only a few minutes.  There are no blown highlights anymore and no blocked shadows.  Detail in the shadow areas is good and noise is for all intents and purposes invisible.  If I was going to print it I’d probably do some additional adjusting, but even this looks pretty good, I think.

One example, certainly, doesn’t constitute “proof”.  But it’s encouraging.  Especially for those of us who tend to use Lightroom as our primary software.  If I don’t have to go to Photoshop, great.  We’ll just continue to keep that monster in its cage until we absolutely need it.

There are other changes as well.  Lightroom now (finally) includes softproofing, both for printers and for monitors.  I haven’t used that yet, but it sounds good.  They’ve also introduced some movie functionality as well as a new bookmaking module.  I have played with the movie stuff (disappointing), but have not even looked at the bookmaking.

Not that I need another software expense.  Seems like I just switched over to LR3.  But I do like the new Develop functionality.  More headroom at the edges of the histogram is always a good thing.

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