Adobe have announced Lightroom CC and Lightroom 6. They ship today in the same installer. After a long gestation, some much requested features have finally come to fruition. Some are fledging with great things to come. Some are really useful. Some are “about time”. Of course there’s always things we like to have seen but for now, here’s the basic list.
Face Recognition: Lightroom now has face detection built in as standard. You can draw and detect faces in Loupe and manage the faces, known and unknown in the new People view. As you add more names, Lightroom gets better and better at suggesting name for faces.
Photomerge: You can now do HDR and Panorama merges in Lightroom. It creates DNG files with full Raw capabilities in a smaller file size than the tradition 32 bit TIFF that HDR Pro exports.
Performance improvements: There’s been loads of under the hood changes to make import and export faster, as well as faster thumbnail previews. Develop gets GPU acceleration for the first time. Mac users need 10.9 for this to work but it works on most modern graphics cards with the newest drivers.
Slideshow got some love with the much requested Pan and Zoom effect (AKA Ken Burns). There’s a new playlist feature with up to 10 tracks. You can fit the slideshow to the tracks, or you can tie it to the music so it transitions on the beat.
Graduated and Radial Filters get a new Brush feature where you can paint way the effect, meaning you can bring back detail in mountains when using a grad for example. Awesome.
Lightroom mobile has seen some additions too. Android is now out on Tablets as well. You can run from an SD card now, giving you more space for photos. Android Devices with Lollipop can import the native DNG file the cameras create. iOS benefits from TIFF support (yay!-I’m a 645Pro user, which has TIFF) and improved crop.
Web has been a brand new preview engine which previews HTML5 better. Flash galleries are gone. The Lightroom HTML Gallery has been replaced and renamed to Classic Gallery. There are three new galleries also. Track, Square and Grid.
Map has also had an underlying engine rewrite to make it run faster.
There’s also small things, like creating a Collection on Import or CMYK Soft Proofing.
There’s a huge list of new camera and lens additions all visible at Lightroom Journal and at Richard Curtis’ Blog.
There’s also my Book, but I’ll tell you about that in another post.
CC users will get the update for free and it will show in the CC app for download like previous Lightroom updates.
