It’s no secret that Lightroom 4.0 had more than its fair share of frustrations, but the engineering team have been working flat out, and after 2 release candidates, the final 4.1 release is now ready for download. It’s not perfect, but early reports show significant improvements.
Here are the download links you’ll need:
ACR 7.1 for CS6 – Windows – Mac
So what’s new? Camera support, for a start:
- Canon 1DX, 5DMk3, G1X, S100V, 60Da
- Fuji F505EXR, F605EXR, F770EXR, F775EXR, HS30EXR, HS33EXR, X-S1, X-Pro1
- Leaf Credo 80
- Leica M Monochrom, X2
- Nikon D4, D800, D800E
- Olympus OM-D E-M5
- Panasonic DMC-GF5
- Pentax K-01
- Ricoh Lens A16 24-85mm
- Samsung NX20, NX210, NX1000
- Sony Alpha NEX-F3, NEX-VG20, SLT-A37, SLT-A57
- Various new lenses too
Performance issues have been a primary focus for this release. There is still one known issue which needs a little more testing before including in a release – applying Clarity early in your workflow, particularly when combined with Noise Reduction and/or Sharpening, can slow things down significantly. If you’re seeing performance issues, try adding those settings later in your workflow. Of course, photos set to PV2012 may still be slightly slower than PV2010, as they’re much more processor intensive, but overall, I’m hoping that everyone’s going to be happier.
There are also a number of other bug fixes for issues that affected 4.0. They include:
- Point Curves were lost in the catalog upgrade – they’re restored by 4.1, if you haven’t already fixed them using the release candidates.
- Clarity added grey tinting to 100% white tones, which is now gone.
- Edit in external editors was partially broken in 4.0 – that’s fixed.
- Secondary monitor speed issues have been fixed.
- Viewing large folders in upgraded catalogs didn’t work.
- Hundreds of other smaller bugs too.
Lightroom x.1 releases are the only dot releases that can include new features, and 4.1 is no exception.
- Stunning new chromatic aberration tools for axial/longitudinal CA.
- Import of 32-bit floating point TIFF or DNG images.
- HDR processing for 16, 24 or 32 bit TIFF files.
- Save pages as JPEGs from the Book module.
- Edit in external editors as JPEG (for programs that can’t use TIFF/PSD)
- Adobe Revel is now a full Publish Services plug-in, not just an Export plug-in.
- Map module can now accept altitude from GPS track logs or from directly typing in the field.
I’ve updated my book to include the new features. More on that in the next post.
Thank you to everyone who posted bugs and provided performance feedback on the Official Bug Report / Feature Request forum. I look forward to hearing how you get on with 4.1 final!
Do you think Adobe will eventually add a panoramic merge tool to LR? While I know PS has that and other great features, the bandwidth and cost to learn PS makes me hesitant to dive into it… especially since LR seems to do 95% of everything I need (other then Panoramas, Blur tools and content aware). Maybe I’m asking too much… any opinions?
It may well appear one day Aron, but I couldn’t put a timescale on it. You could consider Photoshop Elements for those kind of tools, without such a large learning curve.
So that’s the thing, I’ve never been able to figure out if PS Elements has those tools. Of the top of my head, I would think the main functions I would look for are what I listed before (Panorama merge/straighten, lens blur and content aware).
I don’t use PSE very often, but the help files often offer extra clues:
Panorama –
Lens blur – the gaussian blur would probably work ok for you
Content aware – in the spot healing as well as panorama –
If you drop into the forums (linked on the menubar), some of our regulars use PSE regularly and will be pleased to answer more detailed questions.
wow! thank you.
Fuji X-Pro 1 support … woot!