Lightroom 4.1 is now available as Release Candidates on Adobe Labs.   The ‘release candidate’ label indicates that this update is well tested but would benefit from additional community testing before it is distributed automatically to all of our customers.  The final release of Lightroom 4.1 may have additional corrections or camera support.

Bugs Corrected in the Lightroom 4.1 Release Candidate

The following bugs that were part the Lightroom 4 releases have been corrected. The team appreciates the very detailed feedback the community has provided on Lightroom 4 and we’re excited to correct a number of issues experienced by our customers. These issues have been FIXED:

• Point Curve adjustments made in Lightroom 3 and before have been restored.
• Lightroom 4 did not properly open external applications when using the “Edit In” functionality.
• Addressed performance issues in Lightroom 4, particularly when loading GPS track logs, using a secondary monitor, and the controls within the Develop module.
• Ability to update DNG previews and metadata for more than 100 photos has been restored.
• This update allows for improved viewing of subfolders and stacks in folders with a large number of photos.
• It was possible that a layout of a saved book could be lost after quitting Lightroom 4.
• Please provide feedback on your experience with the Lightroom 4.1 Release Candidate in our Feedback Portal.

New Camera Support in Lightroom 4.1 Release Candidate

• Canon EOS 5D Mk III

Run over to Adobe Labs to grab the Lightroom 4.1 Release Candidate

onOne Software Announces Availability of Perfect Resize
for Adobe Photoshop, Photoshop Lightroom and Apple Aperture

The next generation of Genuine Fractals includes new features to optimize image enlargement quality and time saving interface enhancements to help photographers quickly create high quality images.

Portland, OR- December 9, 2010 – onOne Software, Inc., a leading developer of innovative, timesaving solutions for professional and advanced amateur photographers, today announced the immediate availability of Perfect Resize, one component of the Perfect Photo Suite 5.5 for Adobe® Photoshop®, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom® and Apple Aperture. The next generation of Genuine Fractals technology, Perfect Resize adds new features for achieving sharp detail when enlarging images, new gallery wrap and tiling options, and interface enhancements for photographers who want to make the highest quality prints. Perfect Resize supports Photoshop CS5, CS4 and CS3 and can now be used directly from within Adobe Photoshop Lightroom and Apple Aperture without the need for a separate host application.

“We are very pleased to introduce Perfect Resize and the new capabilities that build on Genuine Fractals, the industry standard for image resizing,” said Craig Keudell, president of onOne Software. “For photographers who print for themselves or their clients, continuing to improve image detail in their enlargements and to quickly create popular Gallery Wraps is critical for their business. We are dedicated to continually offering added value and improving on our best in class tools to help photographers achieve outstanding results quickly and easily.”

“I have had a chance to try out Perfect Resize 7 and I am blown away by how awesome it is! I recently resized a 30 inch print to 90 inches tall and the image quality is amazing”, said Elizabeth Carmel, Nature and Landscape photographer. “The new smoothing slider and the sharpening options are key features that make a huge difference by providing incredible detail and smoothness in the enlarged print. I love this new upgrade and thank onOne Software for helping me produce the highest quality prints possible. Plus, having the canvas wrap fill in the corners is a major time saver.”

New Features in Perfect Resize, the next generation of Genuine Fractals:

NEW Smoothness Control: Designed for the demanding photographer, the new Smoothness control allows users to adjust the smoothness of curved edges to minimize artifacts. This new feature is very useful when resizing images and is especially valuable when working with lower resolution source files or when an extreme crop is required from a higher resolution source file.

NEW Loupe Tool: With the new Loupe feature, photographers can get an instant 1:1 or 100% magnified preview of enlargement quality while still seeing the entire image with the Loupe function of the Navigator.

NEW Presets: Photographers can now achieve consistent results in less time by saving commonly used settings with the new Presets feature. Photographers who routinely send images to labs will benefit by creating a preset that allows them to resize the image, apply a specific sharpening amount and apply a gallery wrap all in one step. Stock photographers who need to resize batches of images before submitting them will also benefit from this new feature.

NEW Sharpening Methods: Two new sharpening methods allow photographers to sharpen small details without causing halos on larger, distinct edges. The first sharpening method targets out-of-focus images and the second method adapts the sharpening amount automatically to the size of image details.

Work Directly with Lightroom and Aperture: Perfect Resize now integrates directly with Photoshop Lightroom and Apple Aperture and no longer requires a host application to get amazing results when enlarging an image. Of course, it still works within Adobe Photoshop as well.

Improved Gallery Wrap: Photographers can now preview the Perfect Resize gallery wrap results in real time, allowing them to quickly fine tune their settings for the perfect gallery wrap. Additionally, gallery wrap corners are automatically filled in with matching image detail from the surrounding area. While it may not sound like much, the improvements to this feature alone will save photographers hours of time when assembling their gallery wraps.

Improved Tiling: The Tiling feature now automatically saves each tile as new file. This makes it much easier to save and print individual tiles especially when sending these tiles out to a print service provider. Additionally, because each tile is its own file, it is now easy to create canvas diptychs, triptychs or mosaics with the improved gallery wrap feature.

Batch Processing Enhancements: Easily work with images of mixed size, type and orientation with more batch-processing engine options. Save time by batch processing images from the Export dialog inside of Lightroom.
Misc Improvements: Additional enhancements include presets for common printer resolutions, improved progress indicators, improved film grain simulation, and the additional document size presets for panoramic and no-crop sizes.

Availability

Perfect Resize is available immediately as a standalone product and as a part of the new Perfect Photo Suite 5.5. Owners of Genuine Fractals 6 or earlier can upgrade to Perfect Resize for $99.95 or to the Perfect Photo Suite 5.5 for $349.95. Owners of Plug-In Suite 5 are eligible for a free upgrade to Perfect Photo Suite 5.5, which includes Perfect Resize 7, and can find the update at: http://www.ononesoftware.com/suite5update/.

Users who purchased Genuine Fractals 6 on or after September 27, 2010 will receive a free upgrade to Perfect Resize 7 and will receive an email from onOne Software with instructions for redeeming their free upgrade.

Owners of Plug-In Suite 1, 2, 3 or 4 can upgrade to the Perfect Photo Suite for $199.95. Perfect Photo Suite 5.5 is available to new customers for $499.95; purchased separately the 7 products would normally cost $1460. For more information on upgrade options visit http://www.ononesoftware.com/upgrade/.
For more information on the Perfect Photo Suite 5.5, visit http://www.ononesoftware.com/.

About onOne Software

onOne Software, Inc., a leading developer of innovative software tools for photographers, develops time-saving software solutions for professional and advanced amateur photographers. onOne Software solutions have been created to help photographers spend more of their time behind the camera taking pictures instead of the computer workstation. Such solutions include a wide range of easy-to-use applications and plug-in enhancements for Adobe® Photoshop®, Photoshop Elements, Photoshop Lightroom, Apple Aperture, iPhone and iPad applications. Founded in 2005, onOne Software is a privately held company located in Portland, Oregon. For additional information, visit http://www.ononesoftware.com/ or call 1-888-968-1468.

onOne Software Blog: www.ononesoftware.com/blog
Facebook: www.facebook.com/onOneSoftware
Twitter: www.twitter.com/onOneSoftware

The Need For Speed

Much of the interface changes with Snow Leopard are minor at best and casual users may not even notice the changes with the exception of the Quicktime 10 player which does have a new distinct look.

Now I don’t have the fastest Mac in the world (Apple, if you read this, I will accept sponsorship from you), I am running on a 24″iMac 2.8ghz Intel Core 2 Duo with 4gb RAM which is probably a fairly typical machine for most people so I wouldn’t expect my experience with Snow Leopard to fit well with a lot of people.

Unlike pretty much every version of every operating system from every company since DOS 1.0, has added more and more features and more and more bloat to the system. With many of the optimizations made, and the removal of support for non-Intel based systems (yes, sorry PPC users, this is Intel-Inside only from now on) the footprint of the operating system has been REDUCED by 7GB!! While in today’s world of  terabyte drives, this sounds insignificant, it does allow for a lot of optimizations not possible when trying to support two completely different hardware platforms. Many of these subtle optimizations are found in the Apple system tools.

The most obvious speed improvement is in the Preview application.  I grabbed 32 high res jpeg files totaling about 263mb and opened with Preview, they were completely loaded in just a hair over 1 second.  This is about a 2x speed improvement in an app that many photographers use on a regular basis.

Another area that is a noticeable difference is in file compression. While not as dramatic as Preview, tests typically show a 30-40% speed increase.

What you are not going to see right away is a speed improvement in third-party applications until they are re-written to take advantage of some of the new programming tools. While an application like Photoshop may actually load a little faster, running actions or filters is not going to be any faster initially.

Gizmodo has some nice benchmarks on this that compares Leopard to Snow Leopard on a variety of tasks.

Another task that Gizmodo points out as an improvement is backups with Time Machine.

Macs for Business

At heart I am an IT guy and one of the most annoying things to deal with was your basic corporation running Microsoft Exchange and some yahoo wants to use a mac so they are stuck with substandard tools or the “lite” version of the web interface.  Since I do use Exchange for one of the businesses I am involved with, I wanted to see how well this worked. I loaded up the Mail application, put in my email address and password, and a few seconds later all of my Exchange email was on the Mac. Expanding the Inbox showed all of my folders and browsing through messages was extremely fast, significantly faster than Outlook 2007 on my quad-core Windows XP system. The Exchange functionality extends to iCal and Contacts as well.

To See Me Is To Love Me

Let’s just say I am not a big fan of video chatting. I crawl out of bed and sit down at my desk at 6:00am every day. This is NOT something you want to see until I take my lunch break around 10:30 or so and get “cleaned up”. So as long as you are calling someone else, you may be happy to know that iChat has been improved nicely. In previous versions of iChat, a 640×480 resolution chat would take 900kbps, pretty much killing most home broadband connections. With Snow Leopard, that same chat only needs 200kbps. So like some of the other Apple applications, smoother, faster, cleaner is the mantra with iChat as well.

Getting Your Google On

Normally I use GMail for my day-to-day business needs and Google calendars syncs with pretty much every device I have, and putting my wife over on GMail allows her to see my schedule so she can plan those amazing weekend getaways when I have nothing scheduled (well, thats the plan anyway, I just need weekends with nothing else scheduled). Syncing to the Mac from Google or Yahoo! is now supported in iCal. It’s always nice to have native support for something like Google Calendar without having to resort to hacks or third party tools.

Color Me Tickled Pink

Snow Leopard takes a step forward for graphic designers and photographers by supporting Gamma 2.2. Since Adobe RGB also supports Gamma 2.2, this should make it easier to do calibration across your devices and get the final result from looking different when printed than it does on your screen.

Gamma 2.2 is enabled by default on installation or upgrade so there is nothing you need to do to adjust this or turn it on. Not that Gamma 1.8 was a problem, but improving on something good doesn’t hurt.

Finders Keepers

A nice, much requested feature is adjustable thumbnail sizes per folder. A slider at the bottom of the window when you are in icon mode allows you to scale your thumbnails up to 512×512 pixels. This is great when previewing images since that size is big enough to check for basic focus issues.

Another little trick up the Finder’s sleeve is that if you have a video in the folder, a play button will allow you to play the video right from the thumbnail without launching the full Quicktime player.

To Sum It Up

So long as you are using an Intel-based Mac, I certainly see no reason not to jump on the Snow Leopard bandwagon. Just freeing up 7gb of disk space is awesome, especially for people on limited systems such as the Macbook Air. Having a faster user experience with the promise that as third-party apps take advantage of new programming tools, that we will see improvements in the other tools we use every day is well worth it. For most people, this upgrade is going to set you back a few cents under $30 ($25.00 plus free shipping via Amazon), and for machines bought since June, the upgrade is only $9.95.

While there are dozens of other new tweaks and enhancements, and there are lots of great sites with a plethora of stats, graphs, and benchmarks, I wanted to just see how Snow Leopard was going to affect my every day work, and even while some of the new features are minor, together they add up nicely.

To yourself a favor, make sure you have a good backup before installing a major upgrade like this. While everyone I know has had a great experience, there are some anecdotal comments around that have mentioned problems during the upgrade so just be safe with your data.