On Tuesday, software giant Adobe released a public beta of version 4.0 of its Lightroom photo editing utility. The Lightroom 4.0 beta, a 409 megabyte download (via MacUpdate), adds the following fixes and changes:

- Highlight and shadow recovery brings out all the detail that your camera captures in dark shadows and bright highlights.

- Photo book creation with easy-to-use elegant templates.

- Location-based organization lets you find and group images by location, assign locations to images, and display data from GPS-enabled cameras.

- White balance brush to refine and adjust white balance in specific areas of your images.

- Additional local editing controls let you adjust noise reduction and remove moiré in targeted areas of your images.

- Extended video support for organizing, viewing, and making adjustments and edits to video clips.

- Easy video publishing lets you edit and share video clips on Facebook and Flickr.

- Soft proofing to preview how an image will look when printed with color-managed printers.

- Email directly from Lightroom using the email account of your choice.

The Adobe Lightroom 4.0 beta is available for free and requires Mac OS X 10.6.8 or later to install and run.