Just one of the answers:
"If you would like Lightroom 4 Beta to preserve the visual appearance of your images previously edited in Lightroom or Camera Raw, please save the editing metadata to the file in earlier versions of Lightroom prior to importing them into Lightroom 4 Beta. This will ensure that the prior Process Version and image adjustment settings will be applied in Lightroom 4 Beta.
Another year, another LR beta. Some hots & nots: Lots of video functionality added, like cropping and effects, geo-tagging and soft-proofing, but face detection didn't make it. And its still bad at making cofeee:
"New tools to enhance and share your digital photograph library
A few new cameras are supported in this final version:
Canon" EOS-1D X, PowerShot G1 X, PowerShot S100
Fujifilm: FinePix F505 EXR, FinePix F605 EXR, FinePix HS30 EXR, FinePix HS33 EXR
Nikon: D4, D800, D800E
"What if I told you that by the end of this article I could drastically boost your Photoshop productivity? Interested? That's actually not an exaggeration if you've never taken advantage of Photoshop's actions and batch processing tools. If you find yourself repeatedly performing the same (often mindless) tasks in Photoshop one step at a time, I'm going to show you a better way to work.