Adobe ships Lightroom 4
posted Tuesday, March 6, 2012 at 12:32 AM EST
Back in early January, Adobe Systems Inc. announced the public beta of a new generation of its photographer-oriented imaging application, Lightroom.
Today, the beta comes to an end with the release of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4.
Available immediately on both the Windows and Macintosh platforms, Lightroom 4 brings a number of important new features. (You can get a fuller overview of these in Mike Pasini's preview of the Lightroom 4 beta.) Key among the changes are support for video editing and geotagging, and a refined selection of adjustment controls that are at once less confusing, yet more powerful. There's also local white balance, noise and moire adjustments, soft proofing, photo book creation via Blurb.com, support for video uploading to Facebook and Flickr, and simplified emailing.
Lightroom 4 also supports a number of new camera models. From Canon, this includes the EOS-1D X, PowerShot G1 X, and PowerShot S100. Fujifilm models added include the FinePix F505 EXR, F605 EXR, HS30 EXR, HS33 EXR, and X-S1. Finally, Nikon's D4, D800, and D800E are also newly supported.
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4 is priced at about US$150, half the price of the previous Lightroom 3 release. For photographers owning earlier Lightroom versions, an upgrade version is available, priced at about US$80, some $20 less than for the previous release.
More details can be found on the Adobe website.
Press Release
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4 Now Available
Innovative Shadow and Highlight Recovery and Enhanced Digital Photography Workflows Mark A Milestone Release
SAN JOSE, Calif., — March 6, 2012 — Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq: ADBE) today announced the availability of Adobe® Photoshop® Lightroom® 4 software for Mac OS and Windows. Lightroom is the essential digital photography workflow solution helping amateur and professional photographers quickly import, manage, enhance and showcase their images. First released as a public beta in January 2012, the final version of Lightroom 4 is now available for US$149 for the full version and US$79 for the upgrade, providing an incredible value for photographers. Lightroom 4 introduces refined technology for superior shadow and highlight processing, ability to create photo books, additional local adjustment controls, and enhanced video support.
"Feedback from our customers is invaluable in developing Lightroom and the real trick to a great release is to combine these insights with Adobe's unrivalled image processing innovation," said Winston Hendrickson, vice president of Digital Imaging Products, Adobe. "Lightroom 4 is a stunning new release that will enhance photography workflows and help photographs stand out from the crowd."
New Features in Lightroom 4
Lightroom 4 is a major release, adding significant new capabilities and innovations. New adjustment controls maximize dynamic range from cameras, recovering exceptional shadow details and highlights. The software features new and improved auto adjustments to dynamically set values for exposure and contrast, and additional local adjustment controls including Noise Reduction, Moire and White Balance.
Lightroom 4 provides photographers the tools to create beautiful photo books with 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. A new intuitive Map module displays images already assigned a location, provides location tagging and reverse geo-tagging controls and saved locations for easy assignment of a photographer's common locations.
Now, 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. Video-specific presets and many standard Lightroom image adjustment controls can be applied to video clips, and adjusted videos can be exported as a H.264 file or published directly to Facebook or Flickr.*
In the Develop module, presets fully utilize new processing technology and the addition of soft proofing helps photographers tune images in a destination color space to ensure content looks its best. In addition, customers can now email images directly from Lightroom using an email account of their choice.
Pricing and Availability
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4 is now available for Mac and Windows at www.adobe.com/store. The estimated street price is US$149 for new users or US$79 for upgrades. Minimum system requirements are Mac OS X v10.6.8, v10.7 with Multicore Intel processor, or Microsoft Windows Vista with Service Pack 2 or Windows 7 with Service Pack 1, Intel Pentium 4 or AMD Athlon 64 processor, 2 GB of RAM and a 1024x768 display. For more detailed information about product features, upgrade policies, pricing and language versions, please visit www.adobe.com/go/lightroom.
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.
Adobe Photoshop Family
Adobe Photoshop and Photoshop Extended are at the heart of the Photoshop family, joined by solutions for users at every level who want to bring out the best in their digital images either at home, in the office or on the go. Photoshop Lightroom addresses the workflow needs of amateur and professional photographers, helping them create, manage and showcase images in impactful ways. Photoshop Elements provides consumers with powerful yet easy-to-use tools that organize, edit, create and share photos memories. For mobile devices, the Adobe Photoshop Touch app helps users transform images with core Photoshop features custom-built for tablets; and Adobe Photoshop Express is a free app for simple photo fixes and enhancements, and sharing to social networks*.
About Adobe Systems Incorporated
Adobe is changing the world through digital experiences. For more information, visit www.adobe.com.
Prices listed are the Adobe direct store prices in the US; reseller prices may vary. Prices do not include tax or shipping and handling.
*Adobe online services and other third-party online services are available only to users 13 and older and require agreement to additional terms and/or Adobe's online privacy policy (available at www.adobe.com/go/terms). Online services are not available in all countries or languages, may require user registration and may be subject to change or discontinuation without notice. Additional fees or subscription charges may apply.
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© 2012 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All rights reserved. Adobe, the Adobe logo, Photoshop, and Lightroom are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Adobe Systems Incorporated in the United States and/or other countries. Mac OS is a trademark of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries. Windows is either a registered trademark or a trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries.Flickr is a registered trademark of Yahoo! Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.