After days of speculation and gossip, Lightroom CC has finally been unveiled. Along with a bunch of great new features comes a host of new tweaks and updates. Here, photographer Terry White shows us his six favorite new features in Lightroom CC:
1. Work with HDR Right Inside Lightroom
An interesting new feature in Lightroom is the ability to work with HDR. Thus far, every time we needed to merge two or more images for creating an HDR image we had to open the images in Photoshop or other compatible programs. Not anymore.
To use this feature, all you need to do is open the images in Lightroom.
- Select all of the images.
- Right click, and select Photo Merge and HDR.
- Approve the preview.
- Click Merge to finish the process.
There are a bunch of other things that you can do, like Auto Align, Auto Tone, and Deghosting.
Deghosting is a cool little trick that allows you to remove elements that may not have been on the same spot in all the three images. The merged RAW photo allows you to continue the same editing workflow that you normally have for other images. How cool is that?!
2. Create a Panoramic Image
I can almost see some of you landscape photographers jumping for joy. Yes! Lightroom now has the ability to stitch your frames and make one breathtaking panoramic image. To use this, select all of the images. Right click and select Photo Merge and then Panorama.
3. Better Performance
That may sound like a vague filler, but Lightroom has now actually gotten smarter.
Click on Preferences and the all-new Performance tab will greet you. The new feature considerably speeds up working in the Development module, provided your computer has a graphics card with a GPU processor.
The Develop module is now optimized based on the graphics card and GPU processor on your computer.
Another performance improvement includes a configurable preview option. This depends purely on the display that you’re currently using. if you leave the setting in auto, however, Lightroom will detect the best preview size based on your computer monitor display.
4. Face Detection
Face detection has been around in other Adobe products for awhile, but this is the first time that it has been incorporated into Lightroom.
As the video shows, Lightroom even detects faces on a book cover and from the blurred background of a group shot.
Lightroom can now detect faces and suggest names (based on your preferences).
Click on View and you will now notice a new option called People. Click on it and Lightroom will start looking through the images in that folder/collection and start detecting faces. Once the faces are found you can tag them with a name.
Lightroom can even suggest you tag similar faces with the same name. It does a wonderful job of not only identifying faces but also identifying who they are based on your tags.
5. New Slideshow Features
Slideshow isn’t a new feature in Lightroom, but what is new is the ability to add multiple song tracks. That very much takes care of really long slideshows where a single track may not be enough.
New features have been incorporated into Slideshow.
Additionally, you can now use a cool new feature known as Sync Slideshow to Music. It not only syncs the slideshow to the length of the tracks but to the beat of the music!
6. Lightroom Mobile
In order to add images to your Lightroom collection, no matter where you are, Lightroom mobile now comes with a cool new add option. All you need to do is sign in to your Adobe Play account from a computer, find the images on the hard drive, and click Upload to send the image to your Adobe Play account. The greatest advantage is that the image also gets synced with Lightroom on your desktop.
Have you had a chance to try Lightroom CC? What are your favorite updates?
Like This Article?
Don't Miss The Next One!
Join over 100,000 photographers of all experience levels who receive our free photography tips and articles to stay current:
Great Overview and teaching of the added features. I was fumbling with the face recognition.