Adobe Lightroom 4 beta (1 Viewer)

Its that time again! Adobe have announced the beta of Lightroom 4.

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/lightroom4/

and I have stuff on my website:

http://www.rusticolus.co.uk/nature-and-photography-blog/adobe-lightroom-4-beta.html

Having heard people extolling the virtues of Lightroom as a Raw converter, i thought i would download the new Lightroom 4 Beta, and see how it performed. I have always used Canon DPP so this was my first look at Lightroom. I converted the same photo to a 16 bit TIF file, then to JPG in Photoshp CS2. Both were converted from Raw to TIF, one using the latest version of DPP and the other using Lightroom 4 Beta. Both methods of conversion had no corrections whatsoever applied, and colour temperature was exactly the same.

In the Lightroom version i can see there is more detail in the dark tones, the colours in the iris being the most apparent, but the lightroom version appears slightly warmer for the same colour temperature settings, the DPP version being more realistic as to what was seen on the day.

I only used a 1D IIN so not a great pixel count, something like a 7D may show even more improvement in detail.

I would be interested to see if anyone could do the same test using perhaps a 7D, or 1DS to see if there was any significant improvement with the increased pixels available.

I haven't done any pixel level tests with other products yet, only back to Lr3 but I think that your findings sound positive.

You will see a difference in every RAW conversion tool you try - it is the nature of the conversion process. If you tweaked the default settings used in Lightroom, either through saving based on the sliders or a custom camera profile, you will get consistent results.

The other thing is that Lightroom isn't just about RAW conversion, more about the whole process from import to final display. Although the conversion is very good, it is unlikely to be as good as the camera vendor's own tool when both are used well. However, the RAW conversion is good enough 99% of the time and makes sense when combined with the overall improved workflow.