Tonight at 9 pm Pacific Time, Adobe announced the official release of Lightroom 4.1.  This is a free update to Lightroom 4.0, and addresses several bugs in 4.0, and also adds new camera support. In addition, we have for nice new features:

• Book output to JPEG. We can now save our book pages as individual jpegs. Not only can you use this to send your book to a publisher who requires jpegs, but more importantly to me, you can make single page photo/text layouts (which you can reimport into Lightroom to print or use in a slideshow).

• New Lens Corrections tools for fixing purple and green fringing. In the Lens Corrections panel, there is a new Color tab, with the Lightroom 4.0 Remove Chromatic Aberration check-box, as well as the new purple and green controls. For automatic correction, click on the eye dropper and then click in the purple or green fringe in your photo (while zoomed in to 1:1 or greater), and Lightroom will detect and set the sliders appropriately to correct it. Amount controls the strength of correction, and colors between the two Hue triangles are affected.

• New local purple/green defringe control in the adjustment brush and graduated filters.

• Support for HDR TIFF files (16, 24 and 32 bit). Now once you have merged multiple exposures using Photoshop’s HDR-Pro, you can do the tone mapping nondestructively using Lightroom’s Develop module, rather than Photoshop’s complicated (and destructive) tone mapping dialog. Files from other HDR programs are also supported. Note that 32-bit PSD’s are not supported, so be sure to save in Photoshop as a TIFF.
• Adobe Revel has been moved to Publish Services

To update Lightroom to 4.1, if you are not prompted automatically when you open the program, go to Help>Check for Updates.

According to Adobe the following bugs have been fixed:

• • Point Curve adjustments made in Lightroom 3 have been restored.
  • Edit-in functionality has been restored to external applications including Adobe Photoshop and Nik plugins
  • Addressed performance issues in Lightroom 4, particularly when loading GPS track logs, using a secondary monitor, and the controls within the Develop module.
  • Ability to update DNG previews and metadata for more than 100 photos has been restored.
  • This update allows for improved viewing of subfolders and stacks in folders with a large number of photos.
  • It was possible that a layout of a saved book could be lost after quitting Lightroom 4.
  • Adjustments made in the Develop module were not properly being reflected to photos that have been laid out in the Book Module
  • Postscript Type 1 Fonts do not appear in the Font menu within the Book module.
  • Clarity adds grey tinting to 100% white tones.

Known Issues

• Double byte fonts such as those found in Chinese and Japanese characters are not being exported to PDF or when published to Blurb.
• The Revel Publish Service will delete photos from a carousel. This occurs when the customer asks Lightroom to delete the carousel and then cancels out of the confirmation dialogue box.

Click here for the Adobe post, with details on new cameras supported and more.

Related post: What’s New in Lightroom 4 Video Summary