Adobe Announces Free Beta of Adobe Lightroom 4

In a press release today, Adobe Systems Incorporated announced that a free download of the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4 beta for Windows and Mac is now available.

From the release:

Lightroom is the essential digital photography workflow solution helping amateur and professional photographers quickly import, manage, enhance and showcase their images. Lightroom 4 beta is a preview of new features and capabilities that will be offered in the final release of Lightroom 4, expected in early 2012. The beta features refined technology for superior shadow and highlight processing, expanded management capabilities including enhanced DSLR video support and the ability to create beautiful photo books from within Lightroom. Adobe encourages photographers to try the beta release and provide feedback to the product team.

“Giving early customer access to new versions of Lightroom has helped our team deliver an outstanding battle-tested product that really stands up to the demands of photographers worldwide,” said Winston Hendrickson, vice president of Digital Imaging Products, Adobe. “The much anticipated release of Lightroom 4 beta continues this tradition and shows how much Adobe values customer insights into photography workflows.”

New features include:

• All new basic tonal adjustment controls extract the entire dynamic range from cameras for stunning shadow details and highlights.
• New native video support gives photographers the capability to play, trim and extract frames from video clips shot on DSLRs, point-and-shoot cameras and smartphones.
• The addition of soft proofing helps photographers tune images in a destination color space to ensure prints and Web content look their best.
• The new intuitive Map module displays images already assigned a location, provides location tagging controls and saved locations for effortless assignment of a photographer’s common locations.
• In the Develop module, the addition of soft proofing helps photographers tune images in a destination color space to ensure prints and Web content look their best.
• Customers can now email images directly from Lightroom using an email account of their choice including Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4 beta is available immediately as a free download on both Windows and Mac at http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/.

The beta will expire March 31, 2012.