By Michael Muchmore Nothing makes working with digital photos smoother than Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. And while version 5 is not as dramatic an update as its predecessor, the new Lightroom adds some very powerful and extremely useful new tools. According to Adobe, the new version actually includes over 50 new features and 400 bug fixes, but there's nothing on the scale of Lightroom 4's addition of the Maps mode or introduction of basic video editing. The price remains an extremely reasonable $149 for pro-level software, with upgrades from any previously purchased version at $79.
Lightroom remains the tool of choice of pro and prosumer digital photographers who need a streamlined way to import, organize, and tweak, and output large numbers of high-resolution photo files. It remains a must-have app for anyone serious about digital photography, and the new tools—perspective correction, healing brushes, and Smart Previews among the most notable—make it even more so.
Setup
To run Lightroom 5, you'll need a recent operating system, as it's only available for Mac OS X 10.7 Lion or 10.8 Mountain Lion and Windows 7 with Service Pack 1 or Windows 8. It's a 810MB download, so have a fast Internet connection or leave lots of time. You also have the option to download a full-featured 30 day trial or get Lightroom as part of Creative Cloud. Finally, an educational full version is available for $79 to students and teachers.
Interface
Not a whole lot has changed with the interface design in Lightroom 5 from its predecessor. Unlike Apple Aperture (4 stars), Lightroom uses separate "modes" for organizing (Library), adjusting (Develop), and other program functions. But you can turn on and off the mode entries at top left; by default these now include Library, Develop, Map, Book, Slideshow, and Print. This is useful, if, for example, you never use the Slideshow or Web modes. Another interface detail is that the first time you visit a view in the app, you'll see a help box giving you a tip about using it. You can turn these off, but they're a nice new touch. We'll see more interface changes in the Photo Adjustment section below.
Importing Photos
Lightroom has a big, ever-present Import button and media auto-detect that launches the non-destructive importer. This lets you see thumbnails and full size images on memory cards even before importing. Lightroom lets you start work on any photo in the set before all the import processing is done. ACDSee Pro let me start processing while an import was still in progress, too, but it couldn't automatically apply adjustments aside from rotation on import, and it was much slower than Lightroom.
Like Aperture, Lightroom imports pictures into its own database, aka "catalog," where other programs and the files system can't access to them (unless you change that option or export the pictures later). The database approach makes sense for photographers with huge collections of large images. Usually, you'll want to import photos as camera raw files, which offer more control over the final images. Lightroom supports raw conversion for every major DSLR and high-end digital camera.
Another way to get photos onto your computer is to tether. Mostly of use to pro photographers, tethering lets you connect your camera with a USB or FireWire cable and actually control the shutter release from the computer. Lightroom let me shoot from my laptop with a more elegant UI than Aperture's bare-bones tethering box—an area where Adobe beats Apple on interface. ACDSee and CyberLink PhotoDirector, by comparison, offer no tethering capability.
In Library mode, double-clicking takes you between thumbnail and screen-fit view, and another click zooms in to 100 percent. Zooming, unfortunately is limited to Fit, Fill, and ratios like 1:3, and 1:2, and it doesn't make good use of the mouse wheel, as many other photo editors do. But Lightroom not only gives you thumbnail and full views of your images and the ability to star rate, pick, or color-code images, but it also lets you group pictures into Quick Collections of thumbnails you select and Smart Collections of photos that meet rating or other criteria.
Star rating, flagging, and rotating can also be done from within the thumbnails. And, from Library Mode, you can use Quick Develop, which may be all you need if your pictures just need a lighting fix or to apply a preset effect (B&W, Cross Process, and the usual Instagram-like suspects). One basic fix you can't do unless you move to Develop, however, is cropping, but you can hit the R keyboard shortcut to get right to the cropper, which has been bolstered with aspect ratio presets.
Another neat tool in Library mode is the spray-paint-can button, which lets you click on thumbnails to apply either metadata or adjustment presets. The program also does a good job of making it easy to compare images side by side. Finally, a Survey mode lets you select several images for larger comparison views.
Upright Perspective Correction
The new Upright tool, which corrects geometric distortion that comes from pointing your camera up at a subject, for example, is something Lightroom 5 shares with the new Photoshop CC. In Develop mode, under Lens Corrections, you'll now see tabs labeled Basic, Profile, Color, and Manual. It's actually in Basic that you'll see the new Upright option, which attempts to correct perspective. I tried this out on an cityscape of skyscrapers, and the result was a definite improvement compared with the original's off kilter angles.
You get four button options with Upright—Auto, Level, Vertical, and Full. But when you have people in your shot, especially on the sides of a wide shot, it's harder to get everything looking natural. A product aimed at nothing but this problem is DxO ViewPoint, which offers more control than Lightroom's Upright. Of course, Lightroom still offers manual sliders to adjust geometric distortion, but that can be dicey, especially where people are in the photo. In all, Upright is a valuable tool, particularly if you shoot geometrical structures such as signage. Our camera analyst and experienced pro photog, Jim Fisher, swears by the new tool, and that says a lot.
Healing Brush
Photoshop users will also be familiar with the term "healing brush." What this does is to let you actually remove an object from your photo, replacing it with a texture and color from another area in the photo. Lightroom 4 let you do this, but with version 5 you can select a non-circular region for the correction. This is a big help, since most objects aren't perfectly circular, and you might want irregular shapes to retain the original image. Another new option is the "visualize" spots setting, which displays a negative of your picture so you can see spots you may have missed. This actually showed me some subtle spots on a wall that I'd missed in normal view (see slideshow).
Another related pixel-level correction is the new "radial filter." Also known as "radial gradient" since its effects are feathered out in a gradient, the new tool sits on the Develop mode's right tool panel between the graduated filter (useful for "tilt shift" effects) and the adjustment brush. The radial filter lets you apply exposure, color temperature, contrast, clarity, and other adjustments to an elliptical area in the photo you select. For faces especially, it's a highly useful tool. One nitpick is that it doesn't offer the Vibrancy adjustment. On the plus side, you can use the excellent Clarity adjustment, and you can invert the elliptical mask to apply the effects to the area outside your selection and adjust the feathering range.
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