Adobe unveiled a public beta version of Lightroom 4 on Tuesday. The beta of the digital photo management and editing application for the Mac added new photo album layout features along with improved editing for DSLR video files.
Lightroom is Adobe’s pro and pro-sumer photo management application for Mac OS X and Windows. The version 4 beta added new layout tools for Photo Book albums that offer better control of book designs.
Lightroom 4 beta’s Geotag maps
Photo Book now includes savable custom layouts, and fine-tuned control over text in photo albums. Photographers that also manage some video files get some new features, too, thanks to nondestructive clip trimming, a new white balance control, and new color correction tools and filers.
Version 4 also offers drag and drop image geotagging, a new geotag view that shows all photo locations on a single map much like Apple’s iPhoto, support for marking specific locations as private, and more. Photos can be uploaded to Flickr and Facebook from within the application, although Lightroom’s Principal Product Manager, Tom Hogarty, told The Mac Observer that support for uploading images to other photo sharing services is being left “open to third party developers.”
The Lightroom 4 public beta will be available for download at the Adobe Labs website, and requires Mac OS X 10.6.8 or higher, and is a native 64-bit application. Adobe hopes to ship the final version of Lightroom 4 sometime in early 2012.