With Lightroom officially joining the CC denominator it’s time we take a look at the brand new features that our favorite photo-editor brings. For those worried, Lightroom is still available as a standalone app, branded as Lightroom 6.
One of the biggest new skills Lightroom learned is RAW-merging. Be it different exposures or different shots, it can combine images yet still keep RAW capabilities. Magic!
Panorama
Just select your pictures, hit Photo > Photo Merge > Panorama and wait for the magic to happen. Choose which type of panorama you are shooting, fiddle with a few options and press OK. A brand new DNG appears, ready for deeper editing. No more TIFF’s and re-opening in Photoshop. Merged mages are only available as 8-bit DNG files. No 16 or 32 bit support just yet.
HDR
Same as the Panorama feature, the HDR photo merge gives an easy and quick way to produce natural HDR pictures in the best type of the word. It does what is says on the box: Increase the dynamic range, not ‘create a fairytale world that none wants to see’.
What I would like to see in a future release is the same type of editing with Focus Stacking.
Masking
The Graduated and Radial Filter tools also got a minor but important touch. It’s now possible to finetune those filters with a brush!
Faces
A completely new face-detection feature has been added, but since my image gallery is 170.000 images large, it might take a while until every face is detected, so I keep it disabled for now. A full review will come in the future.
Speed
The biggest improvement is speed. GPU acceleration and code optimisation gives a major speed bump.
If you set things up properly, even ‘light’ computers like the new MacBook can handle a catalog with a breeze, like wedding photographer Sam Hurd demonstrates here.
new 12″ macbook running lightroom insanely fast.
Posted by Sam Hurd Photography on Tuesday, 21 April 2015
Pictures in the Develop mode render faster, images are exported faster. What more can you ask for?
The image-processing-engine hasn’t been updated, but it’s still one that makes your images shine. So no complaints there.
What’s still missing?
For those juggling one computer and several devices like tables and smartphones, there is a well working sync function, giving the option to edit pictures on the go, syncing them back with their full versions at home.
For those juggling two computers, sync isn’t available yet. So my biggest feature request is the ability to have imported pictures on my Macbook sync with my master library on my Mac Pro at home. Or the ability to check out that big project you are working on your desktop to finish on your notebook. Just like I would like a sync between presets, keywords and collections.
