{"id":1919,"date":"2012-01-10T14:00:08","date_gmt":"2012-01-10T05:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/2012-01-10\/1919"},"modified":"2012-01-10T14:00:38","modified_gmt":"2012-01-10T05:00:38","slug":"adobe-has-released-a-public-beta-for-lightroom-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/2012-01-10\/1919","title":{"rendered":"Adobe Has Released a Public Beta for Lightroom 4"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n
\nNOTE<\/b>: Images with an icon next to them have been artificially shrunk to better fit your screen; click the icon to restore them, in place, to their regular size.\n<\/div>\n\n\n

A bit more than a year and a half after releasing Lightroom 3<\/span><\/a>,\nAdobe today has released (the first?) public beta for Lightroom 4.<\/span><\/p>\n\n

Get it here: Lr4 Beta at Adobe<\/a><\/center>\n\n

Lightroom 4<\/span> has lots of new big-ticket goodies, including a book<\/span> module,\nmap module (with geoencoding!), soft proofing, more video support, and a new<\/span> render engine that\ntakes the dramatic improvements in raw image conversion seen in the Lr2→Lr3 to<\/span> the next leap. There are also many\nsmall improvements sprinkled about.<\/p>\n\n

Adobe's Lightroom-Journal\nannouncement<\/a> gives some details, but for a comprehensive<\/span> list of\nchanges, see Victoria\nBampton's always-excellent “What's New” post<\/a>. For\ntutorials, walkthroughs, and other coverage, see this long\nlist of links<\/a> maintained by Sean McCormack<\/p>\n\n

Important note: the Lr4 public beta is a “beta” in the true\nsense: take care to have a backup<\/span> of any images you apply it to, and don't\nexpect that any work you do with it will carry forward to the real Lr4 when\nit comes out. Use it to<\/span> play around with and as a basis<\/span> to provide feedback\n(at Adobe's\nLr4 beta forums<\/a>), but it's not intended to be used (or ready to be\nused) in a production<\/span> environment.<\/p>\n\n

Lr4 and Plugins<\/p>\n\n

Modern versions of my plugins<\/a> should work\njust fine in the Lr4 public beta.<\/p>\n\n

Unlike the last major upgrade (Lr2→Lr3), there's not much new (yet?) for a plugin<\/span>\ndeveloper like me. There was a ton<\/span> of new stuff in Lr3 to occupy my time\n(most of it came in Lr3's\nsecond public beta<\/a>), and the stress of it eventually overwhelmed\nme<\/a>, but in the end it caused me to make beneficial changes to my\nhabits. I'm still<\/span> developing every day, but with more balance. That,\ncombined with a recent<\/span> willingness to walk instead\nof take the car<\/a> and I'm in pretty good shape, at my lowest weight in a\ndecade<\/span> (88kg · 195lb · on my 6'4\"\nframe)<\/span>, but you don't want to hear about that, you want to hear\nabout Lightroom...<\/p>\n\n\n

Lr4 and Geoencoding<\/p>\n\n

The only Lr4-specific change in my plugins so far is in my Geoencoding-support\nplugin<\/a>: the silly kludge of “shadow data” that I had<\/span> to come up with in\nLr1 is now gone because Lightroom's plugin infrastructure finally<\/i>\nallows me to update the “real” location data.<\/p>\n\n

The Lr4 public beta does not allow you to upgrade an old catalog to Lr4,\nso there's not yet a need<\/span> to migrate old shadow data to real data, but I'll\nbuild something to handle that before Lr4 proper is out.<\/p>\n\n

I'm absolutely thrilled<\/i> that Lr4's new Map Module<\/b> allows\ngeoencoding, in a variety<\/span> of ways no less (drop-n-drag on a map!<\/span>), but I'm\nnot partial to how GPS-unit tracklogs are handled, so I'll probably\ncontinue to use my plugin to geoencode with them. My plugin<\/span> also includes a\nbunch<\/span> of other geoencoding-related support functions (enhanced reverse\ngeocoding, view locations in KML, etc.) so I expect<\/span> the plugin to become\neven more popular: the ease of the Map Module will bring more Lr users to\nthe geoencoding fold.<\/p>\n\n\n

Lr4 and Plugin Registration<\/p>\n\n

My plugins are free for everyone to use forever, without payment to me\nor anyone else. However, I do encourage<\/span> optional\nregistration<\/a>, which generally costs 1 cent in a PayPal<\/span> fee. (If you\nchoose to register and choose to include more than PayPal's minimum as a\ngift<\/span> to me, PayPal will take its larger cut in fees, and if there's\nanything left over for me, you have my gratitude.)<\/p>\n\n

However, none of this has anything to do with the Lr4 public beta, since\nregistration is disabled in the public beta. But it does<\/span> bring up a point<\/span>\nthat will matter when Lr4.0 proper is released: the plugin registration\nsystem that I came<\/span> up with ties a registration<\/span> to a Lightroom<\/span> serial\nnumber, but since a major<\/span>-version upgrade of Lightroom involves a new<\/span>\nLightroom serial number for Adobe, such an upgrade renders all my plugin\nregistrations invalid. That means that folks who want to register my\nplugins must re-register them after an upgrade.<\/p>\n\n

The hassle factor makes this really unfortunate, but in the end I hope<\/span>\nit's not too burdensome, with registrations being optional and 1-cent and\nall. I'm sure I<\/span>'ll get flooded with messages by folks not understanding\nwhat went wrong with their plugin registration, or those who do understand\nit but don't like it. Let me offer<\/span> my apologies up front.<\/p>\n\n

Continued here...<\/a><\/i><\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A bit more than a year and a half after releasing Lightroom 3, Adobe today has released (the first?) public beta for Lightroom 4.<\/p> Get it here: Lr4 Beta at Adobe

Lightroom 4 has lots of new big-ticket goodies, including a book module, map module (with geoencoding!), soft proofing, more video support, and a new render engine that takes the dramatic improvements in raw image conversion seen in the Lr2→Lr3 to the next leap. There are also many small improvements sprinkled about.<\/p>

Adobe's Lightroom-Journal announcement gives some details, but for a comprehensive list of changes, see Victoria Bampton's always-excellent \"What's [...]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,13],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1919"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1919"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1919\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1919"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1919"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1919"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}