After yet another update to the LightRoom 4.xx installment, some bugs persist and new ones rear their ugly head. The most peculiar of them is what appears to be a color rendering issue that many users have noticed. There are many threads on this issue on the interwebs, here's one, and another one. Also.

This release adds the best defringing tool Adobe has ever produced, support for many new cameras, and some bug fixes.

Adobe press release

Adobe Announces Lightroom 4.1 Release Candidate 2

"As we all know, dust spots on our images can be quite a annoying little pests to deal with. Just when you think you have them all corrected, you print out a beautiful 20×30 print of your image and say, “oops, I missed one.” While there are basic tools we can use within Lightroom to remove these dust spot (i.e. the Spot Removal Tool), many times there are still dust specks on the image that are harder to spot.

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 

Amazon posted, and then quickly removed the page about Lightroom 4 regular edition. However, they forgot the student/teachers edition page, and we totally ripped it off, for your pleasure. Price will be $149/$79 for regular/student editions.

Customize the Contact Sheet

The template contact sheets are a starting point but you do not need to strictly adhere to their design if you don’t want to and they can be easily customized.

For example, from the layout panel if you click the Keep Square checkbox you will find that in some layouts your images may

The most powerful, but sometimes feared and misunderstood tool of Lightroom gets explained in this small tutorial:

"When you shoot in RAW and import to Lightroom, Lightroom automatically applies a “medium” amount of contrast to your photo. To quickly adjust the contrast of a photo, simply choose one of the presets in this panel. Next to “Point Curve” at the bottom of the panel, click on

The weaker antialiasing filters become on cameras (and it IS a trend) the more important moiré handling in software is:

"As you may have noticed, I used the word “reduce” instead of “remove” in the header of this article. That’s because the moiré pattern often cannot be completely eliminated with a non-destructive editing application like Lightroom (except for mild cases of moiré), especially when moire

Yes, you can edit video in Lightroom now, but its a very crude kind of editing. 

Topaz Labs Press Release

Short story: Forget about it. Long story: You can still forget about it, but Adobe is sorry for you.

"As many have noticed, the Lightroom 4 public beta we released last week does not support Windows XP.  This decision did not come lightly and

Just one of the answers:

"Hey folks, with Lightroom 4 Beta's new RGB curves, I've knocked out some free presets for you:

Faded Yellow, to give an old time look.

"Perfect Portrait 1 is a welcome addition to the suite. Though it’s not quite as sophisticated as some competing portrait programs—my favorite is still Portraiture from Imagenomic—it’s pretty darn good for a first effort. 

"OnOne has been making excellent plugins for years and continues to lead the pack with their innovative and friendly user interfaces. Plugins are meant to reduce the work load, and Perfect Layers is going to be a huge time-saver for professional photographers who need the extra power of

"The improvements in Spot Removal mimic the improvements they made in the DNG fast loading technique. A step back…Adobe adjusted how they create the DNG files upon important to allow the vital image information to load first. In the past the whole file had to be loaded before you

"When you enable soft proofing, the normal dark image background will be replaced with a light background. If "Simulate Paper & Ink" is turned on, the background attempts to simulating paper white rather than pure white for a more accurate preview. The success of such an attempt

"I knew right from the start that I was going to create a preset that simulated an HDR “look”, so here’s my first one. There’s 3 different versions of it (Light, Medium, and Strong) and each has a few of the new sliders incorporated into it as well as some other settings. As always, let everyone

"Importing images is an aspect of Lightroom that users have always found wanting. Beta 4 improves things a bit but probably still has some ways to go before it's nearly as slick as the competition. That said, the changes that have been implemented are to be welcomed. For example, you can

"A built-in map for geo-tagged photos has been available in Apple's competing Aperture ($79.99, 4.5 stars) and even iPhoto apps for more than a year. Of course, my iPhone records location data with the image file for photos snapped with the phone, and photos imported from it

Lightroom 2, whilst not perfect, was streamlined. Lightroom 3 added some useful functionality,  but as a result, started to feel ever so slightly bloated. Although Lightroom 4 adds new modules, it also simplifies and improves existing ones, in the process eliminating this bloat. Once again it

"One hidden feature of the Lightroom print module is the ability to add a frame to an image. In this post I’ll show you how to add a frame to an image before exporting it as a JPEG image ready for uploading to the web or printing. 

"My first 40 pages eBook made in Lightroom 4 is the best way to explain readers what the program can do. Get this free eBook now!"

"Do you feel like me that you become somewhat of a master of Lightroom and can make your pictures just rock by turning them from this in to this, or this in to this, but when it comes to using the Premiere or Final Cut you don’t seem to get the same results?

"Lightroom 3 brought us the ability to add video to the Lightroom catalog and a crude way to preview them. Previews where made though Quick time, by popping the video up as a separate video file. Thankfully all that has changed. Lightroom 4 provides the ability to preview video

"Probably one of the most-requested Lightroom features is the ability to soft proof for screen and print output. The tool bar in Develop is your ticket to a check mark that will enable a proofing dialog beneath the histogram.  The ability to create a Virtual Proof Copy

"The Lightroom 4 beta introduces quite a list of features, including a completely new book-creation module, expanded support for video, soft proofing capability, and geo-tagging of still and video images via a Google Maps-powered module. Image editing tools have also been significantly updated, with a new

"Adobe has released the first public beta of the fourth generation of Lightroom. We don't know when Lightroom 4 will be on sale yet and going by previous public betas it could be some months away yet. There are no restrictions on the beta release and you don't need to already own Lightroom to download

"But, what's a public beta, you ask? It's very clever actually. What it means is that anyone can download LR4 for the next while (maybe a couple of months). No cost, no need to have owned a previous version of Lightroom. Then, when the commercial version of LR4 ships your public beta version will cease to

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