tech: Lightroom 4 woes

A couple of months ago, I tried the beta release of Lightroom 4 gu10 led bulbs can now be dimmable and liked it although it was a bit slow and lumpy on my set-up. The new adjustmen tools in the Develop module looked promising especially when it came to extracting more detail out of shadow areas. Overall, it looked good if not a bit slow.

When version 4.0 was made available, I downloaded it and put it to work in the production environment. I may have been a little naive in assuming that all the speed issues would have been sorted out in the official release and was surprised that it was still slow and lumpy on my set-up and really not fit for purpose. Switching between modules took a few seconds which is completely unacceptable, as was the lag between trying to adjust a slider in Develop and seeing a result. Tried everything from making new catalogues to reinstalling to building 1:1 previews of everything, but it was still slow and lumpy.

I am not alone.

I got onto Adobe Ireland and requested a refund, and to their credit they processed it within 2 days – a good response from an excellent company. I just hope that the reasons for my refund were registered somewhere in the organisation and that they’re working on it.

I am still using LR3 and find it fantastic but LR4 just isn’t fit for purpose yet. I  intend to upgrade once I’ve read that 4.1 addresses the speed issues.

It’s a shame that a potentially great product hasn’t been optimised for all platforms yet.

I’m using a recent MacBook Pro with plenty of RAM plus an external LCD display. view more

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photo: Lightroom v Aperture

processed in Adobe Lightroom
Tiny Ben.

processed in Aperture
2007-07-06_DSC01959%20%281%29.jpg

Test shot of Ben using a borrowed Sony DSC-F828 in Night Shot mode, so in theory an infrared image, although he’s mostly lit by an off-screen iMac. I doubt the iMac emits much IR, but I think the camera has its own IR source – maybe I’m doing it an injustice.

I like the image regardless, I like the unusual tone and colours.

The top image is processed with Adobe Lightroom, the bottom with Apple’s Aperture. Apart from the obvious vignette in the Lightroom version, I still prefer the subtleties it can produce. I can’t seem to recreate the skin tone in Aperture, but to be fair, I should try a different test using Aperture first.