Interesting beta.
I’m not sure what to make of it so far. It doesn’t seem to have any ‘wow must buy it’ features so far.
Faster performance ? not here, but then it’s a beta so all bets are off…
Better importing ?.... I never had a problem with the old UI anyway.
The new custom printing package is welcome and will save using the hacks, but lacks the ability to put photo info data or any other custom text on the page, so doesn’t really cut it fully yet. Hopefully this will be added for release?
The new noise reduction functions look like being good, and may be the ‘must have’ feature, but it’s difficult to really see how good it is without the luminance option available<d’oh>.
Better de-mosaicing ? Intriguing certainly. There seems to be less jaggies on diagonals and a generally smoother look, but somehow some fine detail is appearing to get a little lost. Evaluation isn’t helped by a subtly different tonal rendition between the two versions. Maybe some clever work with sharpening and contrast enhancement might improve things, but it’s not exactly a clear cut advantage on the files I’ve compared so far.
At first mention a grain effect seemed an odd addition, but some experimentation suggests this might be a really nice feature to have available. Carefully used it seems to take out the ‘digital’ look of some images and give them a more natural look. I’ll need to try printing a few samples out to see if this translates as well to print.
Collections appearing in Develop is great, but is the lack of the quick collection a bug or an omission ?
I would still like the option to backup when starting LR, rather than exiting (too easy to forget to do it or it might slow down shut down).
Overall an improvement, and some useful little tweaks across most of the package, but I think a lot of people were hoping for significantly more. I guess Adobe will keep a lot back to keep us buying 4&5.