Lightroom 5, a Must Have?

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Something Altogether New

Believe it or not I've haven't used Lightroom and don't see why I should. But perhaps you have or want to. This write up is a beginners course, if you will and I'll be learning as well as we go along. Before we get started, you should know that Matt Kloskowski is offering a free look at Lightroom this week FREE for registered members. Better hurry, only today and tomorrow left.

Lightroom is Designed For?
When looking at what the top feature us of Lightroom is, some will say it is the RAW management capabilities, others might tell you it is it's minimalistic features which speed up the editing process vs Photoshop, while others may mention the simple file management. Cnet did a review (Lori Grunin) on 06/09/2013 giving it 4 out of 5 stars. Within the normal Good, Bad and bottom Line descriptions she includes, 

The good: Adobe's latest version of Photoshop Lightroom handles offline images a lot more gracefully than previous iterations and adds some tools that streamline local retouching. 

The bad: Still lacks features that some users might miss, including face detection (and related efficiencies), HDR and panorama tools and beyond-basic video support. 

The bottom line: A nice, but not necessarily must-have update, Adobe Lightroom 5 remains a strong program for working with raw images.

She also states that the upgrade while making some photographers happy may not be enough to pay for the iteration. Then she goes on to list; The biggest news: support for proxy editing of disconnected images, a feature dubbed Smart Preview. Other highlights include an overdue distortion and perspective correction tool, Upright; reusable custom page layouts and page-numbering tweaks in the Book module; a radial filter; the expansion of the spot healing/clone tool into a full-blown healing brush; and the option to insert playable videos into slideshows. Plus, there are the usual myriad small updates. What's not here: still no face recognition or tagging, HDR editing, panorama stitching, or expansion of the video capabilities.   

Is it Worth The Upgrade?

 From what I can tell paying for this upgrade if you are primarily using Photoshop, or using LR4, is unnecessary. Also know that Adobe dropped support for Vista, not a surprise there, and also for OSX 10.6.8, which may not be as well accepted as there may be lots of older Apple systems still using this version. Apparently the reviewer, Lori, while importing her images from LR4 to LR5 stopped the process at 40 minutes with only 10% of progress, waiting to run it overnight. Her mention that she couldn't perceive a performance improvement, her system being a fairly fast one, is another reason not to make the move. Yet when you consider the Smart Preview feature you can work on image files from disconnected drives, once imported and the previews are generated. Then you'd be able to export them back to the normally disconnected drive for storage. Though it looks like it takes awhile to generate the previews, longer in fact than the beta version that Adobe allowed users to try out before issuing the final release of LR5. That doesn't settle well with me. 

And while Lori was happy with the expansion of the spot healing/clone tool, she was not as pleased with the tools ability to produce tone matches in large ares, for a facial example she offered, as it took samples, while working beneath the eye, from the lips once and from the eyelashes in another attempt. And following with the new tool Visualize Spots, she mentions that it had trouble displaying spots only, and felt buggy to her. She goes on to say that the Radial Filter works exactly as does the Gradual Filter in Photoshop, and this leaves me to believe only if you are already using Lightroom in general, will you appreciate this addition. She does like the added new tool called Upright which she states, "...can automatically level an image, as well as adjust vertical perspective correction, with or without cropping to the resulting image area." But she shows two images that show a glitch.

 
 




 

Something that everyone will like, yes there is something at least, is the ability to insert a video into your slideshows, by not only the first frame, as in LR4, but videos that play upon loading, this is now doable. that makes for a much quicker, much easier slideshow with video presentation. kudos to LR5.
If you are creating page layouts for a book, calendar etc, you can now do so using the Book module, however the limiting factor is that you can still only do this for Blurb. She finished with adding that you can now geotag by dragging a photo to a saved location in My Photos, the addition of support for Windows HiDPI, aspect ration control in manual lens correction and aspect ratio overlay that you can enable in crop mode.

What's it Worth to You?

I have to admit it isn't worth the upgrade, though I'm not saying for those who have already paid for the upgrade it wasn't worth it, but I just don't see the $79 in value for me. Got your own opinion? Let's hear it.





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