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Friday, June 8, 2012

Lightroom 4.1 final version


After my terrifying experience with LR 4.0 and the volume of negative comments running around the web I thought that the guys at Adobe would have to work hard to fix all the bugs the program was carrying along, and they should work fast too because the competitors are fierce and ready to snack on any failing software, especially if it comes from the nº 1 in the industry.

My major problem was speed, so I worked on two directions, first of all I upgraded my main hard disk to a 2TB unit and my graphic card to a 1GB model, and my second move was to wait until Adobe would come out with a final version of 4.1, since the Beta was still presenting some flaws.

Last week the final version of 4.1 was announced so I diligently downloaded my tons of megabytes and installed right after 4.0. Things, I must confess, have changed quite a bit, the workflow is faster, the banding has disappeared and 4.1 is usable now. Let me be perfectly clear, is not as fast as 3.6, still is quite sluggish when moving from image to image or when is “thinking” and loading an image in the 1:1 view but for sure there’s an improvement since my previous post.

The trouble remains when using the clone tool and paint brush but I think there’s a way around it. There is a major difference if you use the clone tool at the beginning of your process or at the end (or midway) of it; when used at the beginning it works quite normally but if you have played with other sliders before, it can become a bit of a pain in the neck. The paint brush works a bit smoother but it is also affected by how far have you gone with your editing.

From what I have read in the net the culprits seem to be the clarity slider and the chromatic aberration and sharpening modules. My investigation hasn’t go far enough to study the individual parts so I cannot add much more to what I have learnt from others, but anyone can do a test at home and see how it works for him. Bear in mind that everyone has a different story, and what might work for me is probably not working for somebody else and vice versa so the true experience is the one you can make in your own machine.

This is it for the moment, hope it helped a bit, any question drop a comment; I might be out for few days but will be back on the 19th