Well, I was just about to call shenanigans on Adobe for such shoddy “Release Candidates” over the past couple months…  Don’t get me wrong, I’m extremely glad to have the new features that Lightroom 4 offers, and I pretty much can’t live without it now.  But each release did had it’s issues; Lightroom 4.0 was a little more sluggish than LR 3.6, and didn’t provide 5D mk3 / D800 support.  4.1 RC1 had a weird issue with how sharpening was rendered, and LR 4.1 RC2 had an un-bearable lag effect on local adjustments.

Clearly, Adobe could have waited another three or four months and gotten it right the first time.  In my opinion, the bottom line is that they wanted to obsolete Lightroom 3 just in time to profit off the horde of Canon 5D Mk3 and Nikon D800 buyers.  So, shame on Adobe for that.

But now Lightroom 4.1 is official, and so far it is running smoothly.   If you’ve already purchased Lightroom 4.0 and are currently running 4.0 or a 4.1 Release Candidate, just click “Help” and “Check For Updates”.  Or, click HERE…

Tech Talk:

I caked a dozen or so brushes onto an image and nothing slowed down.  General develop module lag time is nearly imperceptible. It even runs smoothly while downloading a 3.97 GB file from the internet, (yes, Timescapes is finally here!!!) …and also transferring 80 GB of files from one external HDD to another.

I will perform additional testing tomorrow, powering an external monitor with “only” 8 GB of RAM and 1.5 GB of graphics.  (By comparison, Lightroom 4.1 RC2 was completely bottlenecking my RAM at 7.8 GB when powering an external monitor  and running Photoshop CS6 and Lightroom at the same time…)

That’s all for now folks!  I better get back to workflowing the 32,000 images we shot in the past week.  I am a happy camper so far; thanks Adobe!

Take care,
=Matt=

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