I’ve put around 10 hours into LRb4.1 and here’s my findings:
1) Its still slooooow! My intial test for all RCs is to throw 650 RAWs at it, LR took 90 secs to do the intial thumbnail load, Silkpix did it in 25 secs, RSP also took 25secs while DPP took 15 secs. All these RCs then grind away in the background doing other stuff. LR was by far the most memory and CPU intensive, which meant wating time!
2) I’m getting use to the workflow but really cant see the benefit of a seperate library and develop module. Ok, Adobe say its serves different purposes. The library is designed for sorting and organising, while the develop is for post proecessing. To be honest if there was a significant performance difference between the two I’d buy into the idea, but there is not.
3) The flexibility of output, image colour and quality are excellent. I still find the Tiffs warm and when I send them to CS2, the colours differ. Strange as I have a colour matched workflow and both CS2 and LR are set up for ProPhotoRGB.
4) The develop module is groundbreaking, to be able to drag histograms and put your cursor on a spot on the image and use the arrows keys to add/subtract curves is amazing. I’d prefer the ability to add some more points though!
5) The print module is nice, but lacks the WYSIWIG view of ICC profiles which you get in CS2. The up sizing of images is good but not as good as using tried and tested CS2 techniques. e.g bicubic smoother over sizing then reducing.
6) The web module seems pointless to me as dont package images in that manner, however it makes a nice flash output. Likewise with the Slideshow module.
7) It crashes a lot, mainly when cropping and rotating images, although it never complains about a restart, I hate to think what its doing to its database…which brings me onto its library database.
8) I'm not too keen to lock my image edits into a proprietary database. I use Iview and even that has XML outputs so you can access metadata later, but LR locks both metadata and edits into a massive libary index system on your hard drive that just keeps on growing.
9) I still found that I was outputting to CS2 to do lens correction and dust bunny removal!
I’ve just revisited a collection of images from a trip to Rome last April and put togther a small gallery with all edits manily being done in LRb4.1. It was a slow tedious but enjoyable process and I was quite impressed with the varied output. So if you are partial to some Vatican art take a look
here!!