REVIEW: Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4 - Let There be Light!

What is new?
Modules in Lightroom are arranged in a way that follows workflow, so the module in which you start is called library, and is used for importing and managing your photos. In this module you can arrange you photos, rate them, comment them, and arrange by various attributes. Unfortunately, this module is mostly used just for importing photos, because most of users still prefer other applications for managing their photo collections, and are fond of simple folder type of arrangement.


Improve your images to the professional level

If you choose to use Lightroom for managing your photos, you will not be disappointed with tools you have at your disposal, and rating and grouping your photos is really quick and simple, especially with addition of Painter tool, which allows you to simply select a rating, flag or any other setting and paint onto thumbnails, so there is no need for aiming all the small icons on every thumbnail. Develop module is the one you will spend most of your time in, cause here you are getting your hands dirty, and here is where magic, Lightroom magic appears.


Adjustment Brush is an extremely powerful tool

Color and lighting correction/edit tools that Lightroom offers has always been impressive, and in this version, few tools were added that really make a difference. Most noticeable is the new Adjustment Brush - even though it was introduced before, it is more powerful than ever. With it now you can "paint" on your photos, and adjust various properties just of that portion of image. For instance, you have too bright or too dark background on your image and you wish to correct that. No problems, simply pass it with brush, and then adjust exposure value.


Similar to Adjustment Brush, Graduated Filters is pretty powerful tool

But exposure is just one of the settings you can change, there is also: Temperature, tint, contrast, highlights, shadows, clarity, saturation, sharpness, noise and moiré. Yes, you can change all of that on just one fragment of your picture! Possibilities of this tool are endless, and even the worst photos can be altered to look decent.
Another of new tools is Graduated Filter, which has similar function as Adjustment Brush, but works on a gradient principle, allowing you to alter setting of one portion of your image with nice smooth gradient pass. Screenshots that follow this article will describe these tools in much better way.


Easily create albums ready for print

Book is a brand new module targeting photographers who like their pictures on a paper, allowing them to create print ready PDFs right out from Lightroom. Creating a book is really simple, cause it is based on drag and drop system, but it suffers from lack of advanced options, so not everyone will use it as their personal portfolio creation software. First and biggest disadvantage of Book module is limit of size presets, only five of them. This is even ok for people using imperial system, but ones that use metric will be faced with the problem that they cannot create their own size preset and are forced to use inch based sizes, which are not compatible with paper sizes used in metrical system. But, if does not matter to you, you can create simple layouts that will present your work in a clear and nice way. If you want something more, you'll have to reach out for InDesign or some other, more powerful tool.


Thanks to Slideshow module, creation of PDF, JPEG and video slideshows in few easy steps

Slideshow module is almost the same as it was before, and offers you a simple way to create PDF, JPEG or Video slideshows. Amount of options is not huge, but neither are slideshows quantum physics.

Web module is the one many of photographers used with a smile, cause not all users are HTML experts, and are mostly dependent on other people to create their web sites that are usually just simple photo galleries with small amount of text for description.


Create your own HTML or Flash photo galleries ready for publishing online

Since its first version, Lightroom offers its users an easy way to create web galleries in HTML and Flash formats, and that is now just polished. Most powerful feature of this module is its simplicity, so that really everyone can create their web galleries in a matter of minutes, without ever seeing a piece of HTML code, Lightroom does it all for you.

Is that it? Not really, Adobe implemented few more features, that are simply more, trendy, then really needed in this kind of package. Now you can make basic adjustments to video files, and share them directly on Facebook or Flickr, you can email images from Lightroom and you can assign a location to any of your pictures. All this features are welcome, but not all of users will ever use them.