Adobe’s
Lightroom is probably the best software
available when it comes to a photographer’s
digital darkroom needs. The company has been
putting lots of time and effort into
building it into something that appeals to
both pros and enthusiasts, and now it’s
releasing Lightroom 5 beta, representing the
fastest turnaround for a major point release
in the app’s history. One big change is the new flexibility of
the spot removal tool. Now people can change
the shape of the spot removal brush, so that
it isn’t just a circle. You can make it
person-shaped, for instance, to get rid of a
someone with a single digital brushstroke.
It’s now fully customizable, so you can
change it to whatever shape best suits your
needs for the actual composition you’re
working on. Adobe Digital Imaging Product
Manager Sharad Mangalick explained in an
interview that this was among the
top-requested features from users, and from
the team itself.
The algorithm underlying the spot removal
tool itself has also been completely
redesigned, making it much better at
matching than has been possible at the past
for taking out large chunks of the scenery
and replacing them with seamless background.
The change is both fast and non-destructive.
In a demo, it worked extremely well about
taking out a person in the foreground
without any noticeable detrimental effects.
Other great new features include the
spot highlighting tool, which points out
dust and specks in stark relief, making them
much easier to zap with the spot removal
tool so they won’t show up and ruin
large-scale prints. There’s also a great new
engine for selectively highlighting certain
parts of an image, which makes it much
easier to give focus to a composition that
otherwise might not have any one place that
draws the eye, with varying degrees of
impact. And there’s a new tool called
upright that automatically corrects
distortion and horizon skewing, which can
instantly transform an image from unusable
to attractive in a single click.
Images can now be edited in a preview
mode that doesn’t actually require the files
to be physically present on the working
drive. Any changes made by an editor are
automatically backed up to the preview
version, and then applied to the original
when it’s present, which is great for
photographers who store most of their
library on external disks.
Adobe Lightroom 5 beta is available as a
free public beta for anyone to try,
regardless of whether you’ve ever used an
Adobe product before, and it will remain
free and fully functional until Adobe
releases a full retail version of the
program later this year. Requires Windows 7
or Windows 8 on PC, or Lion and Mountain
Lion on Mac, and supports HiDPI (0r Retina
display resolution) on both. |