Adobe unveils new version of Lightroom

LAS VEGAS -- Adobe's Photoshop Lightroom has become go-to software for many professional photographers and aspiring pros, who use it to quickly sift through thousands of photos for quick edits before moving onto big boy Photoshop for the serious edit.

Monday night at the Consumer Electronics Show, Adobe unveiled a new version of the $299 Lightroom. But unlike the previous upgrade, there's not a lot of major improvements.

Lightroom 4, which is available as a free beta download that expires on March 31, adds a few new features but nothing as dramatic as the low-light noise reduction tool in Lightroom 3, which made that upgrade a must for many photographers.

What you will get:

—Location. You can geo-tag your photos, and create maps that show where you took pictures.

—Photo book creation. Within Lightroom, you can use the program to make a book that gets sent directly to online book publisher Blurb. Blurb has its own software, but based on a demo with Lightroom product manager Tom Hogarty, the Lightroom tools look more elegant, with more choices. And there's an even bigger bonus. Finished projects can be exported to PDF, which means the entire book layout can be shared on iPads and other devices. (Blurb will let you make a PDF too, but it has a Blurb watermark stamped all over it.)

—Better video support. The previous version imported videos, but wouldn't play them within the program. The new one, and lets you make edits as well.

—Improved retouch. Hogarty says the develop module, where refinements are made to images, has been simplified and improved, with more options, like better shadows and highlights.

Finally, it sounds so retro, but Lightroom has finally figured out a way to send e-mailed photos from within the program, to any web-mail program, a feature it's been sorely lacking in.