Adobe has just announced the availability of Lightroom 4, a digital photography workflow solution for amateur and professional photographers alike.
A big shocker came on the price front where Adobe has slashed the price of Lightroom 4 to $150 for new users. Existing users of Lightroom 3 can upgrade to the new software for just $79. It is available for immediate purchase from Adobe for both Windows and Mac, but support for Windows XP has been dropped.
Adobe Lightroom 4 is a significant upgrade from Lightroom 3 as it adds many new features, while significantly improving on the existing ones, such as the adjustment sliders, that now maximize the amount of dynamic range that can be extracted from RAW files.
Lightroom 4 also adds native support for video editing, allowing photographers to play, extract and edit frames from video files shot on DSLRs and point-and-shoots alike. The edited footage can either be exported to the hard drive as an H.264 file or uploaded directly to social media sites.
A new addition to the Lightroom environment comes in the form of tools that allow photographers to create beautiful photo-books along with the option to play around with text and tailor it to suite the overall look of the photo-book.
Lightroom 4 also incorporates the ability to make localized adjustment to images for white balance, color correction, noise reduction and the likes, making it easier to edit files that were shot in mixed lighting conditions.
Last but not the least, Lightroom 4 adds support for several new upcoming cameras such Canon 1Dx, Nikon D800 and Nikon D4.