What's new in Lightroom 5?

I think every serious photographer should use Adobe Lightroom. It’s a wonderful way to organize and process your photos.

There are several really cool features in the new release of Lightroom 5. The Library Module stayed the same but the Develop Module has new features that make processing even faster and easier.

Here are a few of my favorites: 

Advanced Healing Brush: Adobe has upgrade the healing brush from just being able to remove dust spots with a round brush to being able to remove areas of irregular shapes. It works pretty well for a lot of things. I still have to go into PS for really close work, but it’s a great improvement over the previous versions.

Upright: If you shoot buildings, you’ll love this feature. It straightens tilted images with a single click. The new tool analyzes images and detects skewed horizontal and vertical lines, even straightening shots where the horizon is hidden. It works great with just one click.

Radial Gradient: Adobe finally realized that photographers like to make photos with the main subject off-center. The Radial Gradient tool lets you create off-center vignette effects, or multiple vignettes within a single image. It’s a bit strange to use at first, but you get used to it. The concept is good but I’ll bet they change it in the next release.

Smart Previews: I haven’t used this one yet but it could come in handy. If you store all your photos on an external drive, during Import Lightroom can generate smaller stand-in files of your full-size images. Without the external drive attached, you can make any adjustments to these files and the changes will automatically sync when the drive is attached.

There are some other changes to the Book and Slideshow Module, but I haven’t gotten there yet.

Give Adobe Lightroom a try if you don’t use it already.