Connecting with our fans and followers is a lot of fun for us. It's not often that we find a reason to join calls with 300+ people from near and far – the UK, Germany and even Tahiti! – to live chat and share what we love about Lightroom 4 Beta. Or meet at the Adobe headquarters with a standing-room only Lightroom demo for a nearly 200 person user group. Our launch week live sessions were a great way for us to hear what you all think of the new updates and changes.

As promised, we've given you some time to check out the beta and have gathered questions from our Facebook and Twitter accounts to answer here. There were many, but Lightroom product manager Sharad Mangalick reviewed them all and provides some answers to the most frequently asked questions.

@luxx11 and @jennawoodward Ask:�are the new develop sliders in a different order to the histogram sections? Blacks > Shadows > Exposure > Highlights > Whites would make much more sense.

Sharad: If you would like Lightroom 4 Beta to preserve the visual appearance of your images previously edited in Lightroom or Camera Raw, please save the editing metadata to the file in earlier versions of Lightroom prior to importing them into Lightroom 4 Beta.  This will ensure that the prior Process Version and image adjustment settings will be applied in Lightroom 4 Beta.

We've made some significant upgrades to our imaging processing technology, which resulted in different and often more powerful parameters than before. Because of this difference we recommend that you experiment with them on an image-by-image basis to find the appropriate setting for each image. The order of the adjustments are based on a potentially intuitive workflow but do not represent a strict "top to bottom" requirement.  We recognize that the new adjustments will require some changes in your workflow and we're looking forward to your feedback.

Stephen Wensley Asks: Will we be able to make selections in the develop module?

Sharad: Yes, you can select an area to adjust with the Adjustment Brush.

Ernest Aymerich Asks: Will be able to open and edit AVCHD video?

Sharad: You are able to open, organize, and apply adjustments to the .mts files found in AVCHD videos clips from popular digital still cameras in Lightroom 4 Beta. (Lightroom 4 Beta does not support the entire AVCHD directory structure.)

Ronald Byram and @bedemccarthy Ask: Any new lens profiles for tamron/tokina/sigma? @Lightroom will LR4 camera support stay in sync (up to date) with LR 3.x during the beta period, or will updates only go to 3.x?

Sharad: The lens profiles in Lightroom 4 Beta are the same as the ones in Lightroom 3.6. You can see the full list of lens profiles here.

Ronald Byram Asks: Can we setup custom file type imports? Say omit video in catalog if desired. Only import jpg/raw types.

Sharad: You can do this by using the Sort feature on the bottom of the Import dialogue box.  You can sort by Media Type and File type to check and uncheck the files you'd like to import.

@SteveMops Asks:�/em>

Thank you to everyone who submitted thoughtful questions and feature requests. We'll be hosting another call with hundreds more fans in the near future and want to make sure you're on the look out for that and more updates. If you haven't already, like our Facebook page, follow us @Lightroom and subscribe to our YouTube channel to get all the latest and greatest info on the Lightroom 4 Beta. We've got several playlists of tutorial videos for you to reference as you check it out.

Keep hammering away on the beta and let us know what you think!