I’ve loved Lightroom forever. It’s just the best RAW processor ever and a few weeks ago I upgraded it to LR 4.0 and now 4.1. And this is from someone who generally has a phobia about Adobe products.
The bad : It suffers from really bad lag on my Mac – I’ll move a slider and it stutters or the beach-ball starts spinning. A quad-core Mac with 12Gb RAM struggling to power LR? Hmmm, something is afoot methinks. I seem to remember LR 3 suffered the same initially but then it got sorted. Fingers crossed it’s the same this time.
The change : The processing engine has all changed and with it parts of the Develop UI. Gone is the familiar fill light etc, to be replaced with whites, shadows, highlights ‘n’ blacks and with completely different ‘zero’ points. It all seems pointlessly confusing and unfamiliar. Familiarity with the processing controls is of course what gives you speed and consistent results. Not happy initially…But then…
The good : The new controls and processing are so much more smoother, subtle and yet capable of so much more. Here’s a photo from last year, tweaked using LR 4.1. It almost has a HDR kinda feel to it – but it was done simply by lowering the whites, upping the shadows and tweaking the clarity. I don’t have the patience to do normal HDR photography and also I think it’s a technique to be used sparingly, so now I can give it a go on any image without having to go to the trouble of setting out to do it in the first place. Other good stuff? The Noise Reduction is significantly improved and there’s other new bits and pieces which others elsewhere have already reviewed.
Overall it’s really good but suffers from latency – which I can handle for a short time. Oh, and here’s the non HDR, HDR photo:
80:8 Moving | Still | Blog 