Photoshop Lightroom 4 beta is now available for free

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Photoshop Lightroom, arguably Adobe’s most modern and well liked software on the desktop, has hit the beta stage in its 4.0 release. Like previous versions, Adobe wants as many creative professionals as possible to become addicted to its software during a free beta period.

Here are the highlights of this new release:

• Highlight and shadow recovery brings out all the detail that your camera captures in dark shadows and bright highlights.
• Photo book creation with easy-to-use elegant templates.
• Location-based organization lets you find and group images by location, assign locations to images, and display data from GPS-enabled cameras.
• White balance brush to refine and adjust white balance in specific areas of your images.
• Additional local editing controls let you adjust noise reduction and remove moiré in targeted areas of your images.
• Extended video support for organizing, viewing, and making adjustments and edits to video clips.
• Easy video publishing lets you edit and share video clips on Facebook and Flickr®.
• Soft proofing to preview how an image will look when printed with color-managed printers.
• Email directly from Lightroom using the email account of your choice.

The most interesting aspect is that only 64-Bit capable Macs running Snow Leopard or Lion can run Lightroom. All of you early adopters of Intel Macs, still running Core Duos, won’t be able to run Lightroom. It’s time for you folks to bite the bullet and upgrade.

If you want to try out the next version of Lightroom, you can grab your free beta copy here. Keep in mind, the beta expires on March 31st, so don’t get attached to it if you’re not willing to drop the $299 USD for a full copy or $99 USD for an upgrade.

Source: Lightroom Journal

Grant is a writer from Delaware. In his spare time, Grant maintains a personal blog, hosts The Weekly Roar, hosts Quadcast, and writes for video games.