Adobe Makes Lightroom 4 Public Beta Available

Lightroom fans have an update coming their way. Lightroom 4 makes its debut today, first as a public Beta for crowd-sourced testing. This iteration brings video and stills together in sweet harmony, introduces localized controls and brings lots of new lens profiles to the party. Users can expect to find the following updates:

• Ability to manipulate still images and video within the same space. No longer are stills and videos treated separately, they flow into the same module together. Basic video trimming is now available, and certain adjustments that were once reserved for still images can now be applied to video clips. Video contrast, white balance, tone curves and filters can all be adjusted to a user's liking. Videos may be exported in various sizes.

• A new partnership with Blurb, a popular online book printing platform. Photo books can be assembled in Lightroom 4 and sent directly to Blurb. Basic pricing information will also be available within Lightroom to avoid sticker shock when sending an album to the application.

• Option to email images directly from Lightroom.

• Local controls for white balance adjustment to compensate for mixed lighting situations and new shadow, highlight controls.

• More than 350 new lens profiles will be included in Lightroom 4.

Lightroom 4 will no longer have Windows XP support - it switches to Vista and Windows 7 only on the PC side and Snow Leopard and Lion on the Mac. Per usual the public Beta is a free download and Adobe is all ears for feedback on the product. Find the download and leave your comments at the Adobe Labs site.