I feel your pain. LR 1.0 started with fairly straightforward Basic tools in its Develop module, which have pretty much carried over unchanged into LR 2 and LR 3 version. LR 4 is definitely a bold departure from the familiar Develop tools, and for this reason alone it's understandable why so many people are objecting to the new PV2012 Develop module in LR4. So what could Adobe done instead? They could have launched LR 4 with the same Develop tools slightly enhanced, with new Map and Book modules, but providing only marginally better image quality. No question this would have caused most professional LR users to criticize Adobe for catering to the amateur photography market simply to make more money. Having worked as a computer system design engineer for 20 years and then another 25 years in sales & marketing positions, I’ve seen many bad business decisions made concerning product features and product pricing. IMHO–Adobe has taken a bold but necessary step by departing from the “original” LR Develop tools to make LR a better tool for professional photographers. There is no question that migrating images to LR 4 from previous LR versions is going to be challenging, and I believe this is where we should all be focusing our talent, time and energy. If you truly feel the benefits in LR 4 are out-weighed by the time required to use and/or learn the new tools, then stick with PV2010 in LR 4, or use LR3 and wait for LR 5. This in fact may be the best solution for people who process 100s or even 1,000s of images daily in their business practice, at least until the Adobe community has established some good migration techniques and LR 4 tool usage to speed the processes. I am sure Adobe is listening and will offer migration and productivity improvements to LR 4 in future update releases. I’m still taking this one-day-at-time and processing only new shoot images in LR 4 with PV2012, as I understand it there is an issue when migrating LR 3 catalogs to LR 4 concerning Tone Curve adjustments: http://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/lr4_deleted_all_my_tone_curve_adjustments Until this apparent bug is corrected by Adobe I won’t be importing my LR 3 catalog into LR 4, and I suggest others should investigate if this may create issues when importing their catalogs. That said, I love the improvement to both highlight and shadow detail that PV2012 produces. I look forward to getting more experience with the new Develop tools, and useful tips right here in the Adobe Lightroom forums on ways to speed up conversion of existing images from PV2010 to PV2012…..once this bug has been fixed. BTW – I’m seeing only very minor performance differences with LR 4 using my Windows 7 64 bit system with Intel i7-860 quad core processor and 12 GB RAM.
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