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Adobe Releases Photoshop Lightroom 4, Slashes Price in Half to $149
Adobe today announced the immediate release of Photoshop Lightroom 4, bringing a number of new features and a lower price tag to the company's professional photo management and manipulation software.Lightroom 4 introduces refined technology for superior shadow and highlight processing, ability to create photo books, additional local adjustment controls, and enhanced video support.Photoshop Lightroom 4 was released as a public beta just under two months ago, and Adobe has made several additional improvements since that time.
“Feedback from our customers is invaluable in developing Lightroom and the real trick to a great release is to combine these insights with Adobe’s unrivalled image processing innovation,” said Winston Hendrickson, vice president products, Creative Media Solutions, Adobe. “Lightroom 4 is a stunning new release that will enhance photography workflows and help photographs stand out from the crowd.”
With the release of Lightroom 4, Adobe has slashed the application's price in half to $149, presumably responding to Apple's price cut on Aperture that saw it drop to just $79 when it moved to the Mac App Store with that marketplace's debut in January 2011. Pricing for Student/Teacher and Upgrade editions of Lightroom 4 is set at $79, with the Upgrade edition valid for any previous version of Lightroom.
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98 months ago
I have always flat out refused to pay adobe's prices.
Now if they price Photoshop and Illustrator at points that don't make me wet myself laughing they might get some of my money.
To be fair, Photoshop Elements is a great product for non-pro users & is priced very reasonably.
98 months ago
I know this might be controversial and I'm not trying to stir up the ages old Aperture vs Lightroom debate, but I imagine there are other reasons for the price change other than Aperture, and I imagine the same price point will be applied on the Windows version where Aperture does not exist.
I have used both pieces of software (I now use iPhoto) and I have to say that while LR bugged me with some things it did, Aperture had far more significant problems. When I got Aperture it had added photo books support, and it was so buggy and slow that it was literally impossible to use without having it crash after long periods of beachballs. Updates came and did not address it, after a while I suppose it was fixed but I had certainly lost interest at that point. Sharing photos was/(still is?) pathetically complicated. The performance of the whole suite was ridiculously poor. The machine I used Aperture on (same as LR) was 2.4ghz MBP with 8GB of RAM and the photo library was large-ish but <50GB. None of this happened with any version or BETA of LR .. far from being an Adobe fan, I at least respect that they do reasonable verification of their software that they sell (for insane pricing)
I have used both pieces of software (I now use iPhoto) and I have to say that while LR bugged me with some things it did, Aperture had far more significant problems. When I got Aperture it had added photo books support, and it was so buggy and slow that it was literally impossible to use without having it crash after long periods of beachballs. Updates came and did not address it, after a while I suppose it was fixed but I had certainly lost interest at that point. Sharing photos was/(still is?) pathetically complicated. The performance of the whole suite was ridiculously poor. The machine I used Aperture on (same as LR) was 2.4ghz MBP with 8GB of RAM and the photo library was large-ish but <50GB. None of this happened with any version or BETA of LR .. far from being an Adobe fan, I at least respect that they do reasonable verification of their software that they sell (for insane pricing)
98 months ago
I will be jumping on this right away... been a user of Lightroom since the first beta and love it. I can safely say it has saved me hundreds of hours processing my images as a sports photographer. If you are a photography and don't see value in Lightroom, you probably don't know how to use it properly. If that's the case, I'd encourage you to check out some video tutorials because it really is a huge productivity tool for photography. I'm sure Aperture provides similar capabilities, but I've never used it and prefer to stay in Adobe for when I do need to bounce to Photoshop, which is extremely rare with Lightroom 3, and will be even more infrequent with LR 4.
98 months ago
I don't really know anything about photo software, so go easy on me...
So what's the difference between Elements and Lightroom? Similar pricing, both seem to be aimed at a similar user...what's the real difference, which is a better choice for a basic consumer user, and why do they have the two different apps instead of just making them one?
And for higher end users, would they still have use for this or is this functionality included in the full Photoshop?
Photoshop (Elements or CS) is a destructive editor. If you go into Photoshop and change the sky purple and save it, the sky is purple. Granted, PSD files can use layers to keep things from being destructive and can store an edit history so you cn go back in the sequence, but at heart it's a destructive editor with "oops"-recovery features bolted on.
Lightroom (as Aperture) is a non-destructive editor. If you go into Lightroom and apply a filter to make the sky purple, you can always go back and remove that filter or adjust the filter to make the sky green, whatever. While you can take the current version and send it over to Photoshop etc for pixel-by-pixel editing, at heart Lightroom works as a "cookbook" where you create a recipe and see the results live.
As far as when they are used, generally speaking Lightroom/Aperture replace what a traditional photographer would do in a dark room, tweaking exposure and color image-wide and with masks, etc. Photoshop is more along the lines of "creating" information in the image (such as removing power lines and creating the sky that would have been there). The tools of each can sometimes be used to accomplish the tasks of the other, but if you have both then you're in a more efficient position.
If you decide you want a destructive editor, I'd encourage looking at one of the non-Adobe products rather than Photoshop Elements. Pixelmator and Acorn are the two main competitors out there; I've moved almost completely over to Pixelmator these days. The advantages of going non-Adobe are (1) price/upgrade strategy, (2) less retardation of interface, and (3) performance.
And, yes, full-on pros who use Photoshop will generally also use Lightroom or Aperture for the whole-image development tasks.
98 months ago
Had Aperture for about 2 years now and I'm hoping for a radically new version. My (and clearly a lot of other people's) experience of running version 3 has been painful, and was only remotely stable for me at 3.2 . It is a monumentally unstable resource hog. It may have a better general UI and workflow than LR, but that's about it.
I've played with the LR 4 beta for a couple of months now and it's amazing. Its just better at editing photographs. Its brush and gradient level controls are simply way more powerful than Aperture, noise reduction and exposure being key examples. Aperture simply can't match it.
Having said that, I'd rather Apple get their ar*e in gear and give it the update it needs, than migrate my library into Adobeness on my Mac. But if Aperture 4 takes to long to appear (or just sucks), I might have to. Especially at that price.
Probably wouldn't be alone either. Frankly, a combination of PSE 10 and LR4 represents a ton of power for the price now.
Haha that sounds like an ad. But at least Adobe are having a real go in this space. Apple need to share their plans.
I've played with the LR 4 beta for a couple of months now and it's amazing. Its just better at editing photographs. Its brush and gradient level controls are simply way more powerful than Aperture, noise reduction and exposure being key examples. Aperture simply can't match it.
Having said that, I'd rather Apple get their ar*e in gear and give it the update it needs, than migrate my library into Adobeness on my Mac. But if Aperture 4 takes to long to appear (or just sucks), I might have to. Especially at that price.
Probably wouldn't be alone either. Frankly, a combination of PSE 10 and LR4 represents a ton of power for the price now.
Haha that sounds like an ad. But at least Adobe are having a real go in this space. Apple need to share their plans.
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