Hands on with Adobe's brand new Lightroom 5
The fifth incarnation of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom arrives as both a preview and an adjunct to the company's new Creative Cloud cross-platform suite of apps targeted to photographers, graphic designers, Web developers, and cinematographers. While Lightroom 5, released Monday at midnight Eastern time, is nominally part of Adobe's new subscription-based Creative Cloud successor to Creative Suite, it differs in that it is not subscription-based, but rather available as a traditional software license in a box. Lightroom 5 was released as a public beta in April.
Lightroom is popularly considered as a competitor to Apple's Aperture—which is not strictly a photo editor, but a photo management tool. That said, both have extensive photo editing capabilities—so much so, that many Adobe photo hobbyists may now consider Lightroom a substitute for much of what they can accomplish in Photoshop, for a lot less money.
By itself, Lightroom 5 has some handy new features, including a more advanced, flexible healing brush, the Upright straightening tool, a radial highlighting gradient, smart previews for remote editing, video slideshows, and advanced photo book creation capabilities, among many other enhancements.
Advanced healing brush
While the Healing Brush—used to remove unwanted objects or people from photos—has been part of Lightroom (and Photoshop) for some time, the new Lightroom version features more advanced technology. Previously, the brush offered only a circular shape, making it difficult to remove oddly shaped objects from a photo. Version 5 lets users adjust the size of the brush and move it in precise paths. Sliders let you adjust the size and opacity of the fix. This improvement will prove especially convenient for removing facial flaws from portraits.
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