Adobe has recently released its latest version of Lightroom into beta and reviews of its usability and new features are already beginning to garner widespread positive attention. Some of the features have been long awaited, while others come as a pleasant surprise. In the video below, Lightroom 5 Beta user, Trevor Dayley, takes a few moments to show us some of his favorite new additions to the popular photo editing software:
New Features
While not everything that was added to Lightroom 5 may be of use to everyone, the new features certainly help a majority of photographers. Here are five of Trevor Dayley’s favorite new improvements:
- Radial Filter: Easily produces a highly customizable vignette to help create more powerful photos or to single out a certain subject.
- Improved Spot Removal Tool: Now allows users to clone out defects in a similar style as Photoshop and no longer requires the spot removal to be circular in shape.
- Visualize Spots: Darkens the image to helps users see white spots (i.e. dust) so they can more easily be edited out.
- Upright Tool: Offers a very quick fix to uneven horizon lines and lens distortion.
- Smart Preview: Allows photos stored on external hard drives to be edited when the hard drive is not connected to your computer. After edits are made and the hard drive is reconnected to the computer, Lightroom automatically updates the changes to the files stored on the hard drive.
Before the Radial Filter was applied the background appears to be evenly lit.
Other changes in the release include an improved photobook creation tool and a versatile video slideshow tool.
As mentioned before, Lightroom 5 is now available in public beta via the Adobe Labs website for free; however the license will expire on June 30th, 2013. Adobe does recommend that any critical work be done in an official Lightroom release such as Lightroom 4, as the beta 5 version is for testing purposes only and may not be as stable as previous releases at this time.
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After edits are made and the hard drive is reconnected to the computer, Lightroom normally does NOT automatically update the changes to the files stored on the hard drive. It doesn’t have to, because Lightroom stores all edits in metadata and these metadata are stored in the catalog. The RAW files on your hard drive remain untouched. Updating files on the hard drive is only needed if you write edits to XMP-files, but that’s an option that is turned off by default.
Great tutorial/over view of some of the new features. I love using LR,the spot removal is the most common reason I ever have to leave LR and use PS. I just don’t like that it imports it back into LR as a Tiff so it takes up so much more space. I like the improvements that have been made esp the spot removal tool. I would like to see them make it as good as PS. Thank you! for the info, enjoyed your video. I plan to down load the LR 5 beta version and try it out