Last week, Adobe Labs released Lightroom 4 Beta; the prerelease of the new version before the production release is put on store shelves.

Jenifer and I have been using Lightroom since version 2 for RAW processing all of our personal and studio images (I teach seminars and private lessons for LR v. 2 and 3). Version 3 had some great improvements: Better processing algorithm, better noise reduction, better printing control, etc. Lightroom 4 is going to have some of the things we have been waiting for.

• Localized adjustments for white balance, sharpening and noise reduction among other image adjustments
• the ability to move multiple folders at the same time (seems minor but quite a time saver)
• The ability to hide unused modules (we never use the web module, so now we can save that screen real estate)
• A map module that will utilize GPS metadata. This module will allow searching by location for photos as well as importing GPX track log files from handheld GPS units

I have not spent too much time with LR4 beta yet, but this weekend I will be doing a bunch of images processing and I am looking forward to giving it a more intense run through.