Photoshop guru Scott Kelby has high praise for the overhauled Develop Module that’s coming in Lightroom 4. In a recent post titled “Why I Think Lightroom 4 is Going To Sell Like Crazy“, he writes,

Your photos look better processed in Lightroom 4. Period. [...] The improvements in Lightroom’s Development module are so significant, and so much better than what we’ve ever had before, that I think you’ll be hard-pressed to find most anyone still using Lightroom 3 in just a few months from now. In fact, if they didn’t add another feature, it would still be worth the upgrade just to get better looking images.

You can watch a walkthrough of new the new module here, or play around with the new engine yourself by downloading the free Lightroom 4 Beta release. This is also great news for Photoshop users: the same engine is coming to Photoshop CS6 and Adobe Camera Raw.

(via Scott Kelby via John Nack)

Adobe released a beta version of Lightroom 4 today. New features include support for location data through a map module, book making through Blurb, new video features, new shadow/highlight controls, simplified basic adjustments, new local adjustments, and space saving lossy compression for DNG files. You can find a complete list of changes here. You can downloaded the program for free and use it until the beta version expires on March 31st, 2012.

Photoshop Lightroom 4 Beta [Adobe]