onOne Software Blog

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4 Public Beta Available

January 9, 2012 by Mike Wong • 1 Comment

Attention Lightroom users! Adobe has just announced that the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4 Public Beta is now available for download. As with any Beta software (regardless of the developer), Caveat emptor. Make sure you have backups of any files you're working on and think twice about using it SOLELY as your only catalog during the beta period. For me, I'm using duplicates of my images while the originals are safe and sound on a separate hard drive and cataloged in Lightroom 3.

Okay, let's get on to some of the details you're probably most interested in. These are straight from the official Adobe Lightroom Blog. Please read through to the end because I'm going to discuss some specific items that relate to this Lightroom 4 Beta and the onOne Software products.

High Level Summary of What's New

• Robust Video Support
• Manage images by location with the Map Module
• Simplified Basic Adjustments
• Powerful new Shadow & Highlight controls
• Additional local adjustments including Noise Reduction and White Balance
• Soft Proofing Reinvented
• Elegant Photo Book creation
• Email from directly within Lightroom
• Publish videos directly to Facebook or Flickr
• Enhanced DNG workflows
• Adobe Revel export workflow

Supported File Formats

• JPEG
• TIFF (8 bit, 16 bit)
• PSD (8 bit, 16 bit)
• DNG
• Raw (Please visit http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/cameraraw.html for a full list of raw file support. File support for Lightroom 4 beta, aligns with Lightroom 3.6 and Camera Raw 6.6)

Serial Numbers for Lightroom 4

Anyone can download and work with the Lightroom 4 beta for the duration of the beta program. There is no serial number requirement.

Be sure to read the full blog entry on the Official Lightroom Blog as they have, as  you would expect, posted many more details about the Public Beta than I have summarized here. Also on their site, they have the all important download links for the Lightroom 4 Public Beta.

FAQ on Lightroom 4 Public Beta and Current onOne Software Products

Do any of the onOne Products support the Lightroom 4 Public Beta?

While we are excited about the Lightroom 4 Public Beta, the Perfect Photo Suite 6 and the individual products that make up the Suite, are only officially supported (and thus available for our free technical support) when used with Lightroom 2 or Lightroom 3. We don't expect there to be any problems with our products when used with the Lightroom 4 Public Beta, but we cannot offer support at this time until the final shipping version of Lightroom 4 is available.

When will your products support Lightroom 4?

Adobe has not announced the final ship date for the GM version of Lightroom 4. However, in the past, we have made every effort to have any updates necessary to make our products work with new versions of third-party applications, such as Lightroom, within 60 days of the third-party application shipping.

Will the Lightroom 4 compatibility update be free?

Since we started onOne Software nearly 7 years ago, it has been our policy to make non-major releases of our software available to registered users of the most recent product at no cost as a downloadable update. As such, we expect that if an update is required to any of our currently shipping products to make them compatible with the shipping version of Lightroom 4, these will not be considered major updates and will be made available as free downloads to registered users.

To be clear, here is a list of our currently shipping products that would be eligible for a free compatibility update.

• Perfect Photo Suite 6
• Perfect Resize 7
• Perfect Effects 3
• Perfect Portrait 1
• Perfect Mask 5
• Perfect Layers 2
• Focal Point 2
• PhotoFrame 4.6 Pro

Older products such as the Plug-In Suite 5.5 are not eligible for a free compatibility upgrade with the final shipping version of Photoshop Lightroom 4.

Update 1/10/12 : For further clarification, we have no plans to update PhotoTune or PhotoTools to be compatible with Lightroom 4.

When will Adobe ship the GM version of Lightroom 4?

Adobe has not announced when they will ship the GM version of Lightroom 4.

With that being said...

Last week, I installed the R20 release of Lightroom 4 (the same one you can download now) and installed it. Prior to that, I had been running the latest version of Lightroom 3 along with the Perfect Photo Suite 6.0.2 release and I'm happy to say, that without having to run another installer again, the Public Beta of Lightroom 4 automatically found and loaded the Lightroom versions of the plug-ins I had previously installed.

The reason is that Lightroom 4 is looking in the same common Application Support folder (at least under Mac OS X) that Lightroom 3 uses. So you shouldn't have to reinstall anything.

As such, the onOne products will show up under the Export menu as well. Select an image (make sure the image is available and not on an external drive that isn't mounted) and then go to File > Export. You'll see this.

You'll want to go to the Export To: drop down menu and change it from Hard Drive to one of the onOne products. Like so...

Once you select the product you wish to Export to, you'll get some product specific options. In the following screen shot, I selected Perfect Effects 3 and then I am able to choose from the list of Effect Preset Categories.

Which then allows me to pick a specific Effect Preset within that Category.

The Export option works great if you're batch processing. But if you want to just work on a single image and you don't know which preset you want to use, just select your image and then go to File > Plug-In Extras > Perfect Photo Suite.

How to Leave Feedback

If you download the Lightroom 4 Public Beta and are using our products, please leave a comment below on your experiences - good or bad. Our technical support team won't be able to provide you with any official support, but if you leave your comment here, I'll make sure our development team sees it and will also respond to you here in the comments. Please note, if you would like to leave a comment here, you'll need to register on the blog first.

If you're looking for a list of non-Adobe web sites that are posting on Lightroom 4, be sure to check out this list on the Lightroom Blog.