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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.
“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.”
Photoshop Lightroom 4 was released as a public beta just under two months ago, and Adobe has made several additional improvements since that time.
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.
Top Rated Comments
To be fair, Photoshop Elements is a great product for non-pro users & is priced very reasonably.
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.