Adobe Lightroom 5 Official Version! Three New Features That You Must Try

As mentioned in my previous post, I was excited about the new upgrade of Adobe Lightroom. At that time Lightroom 5 is only a beta version so that it is not compatible with the Lightroom 4 catalog file. Now finally Adobe puts its official release on its website. What's more, anybody with an Adobe account can enjoy up to 30 days free trial! So if you are not so sure whether Lightroom 5 is the right tool for you, always download the trial version to find out more!

Over the upgrade, the greatest concern is that whether it offers faster processing speed that Lightroom 4. Lightroom 4 is REALLY sluggish, much slower than Lightroom 3, regardless of your hardware specification. A couple of my friends tried out the Lightroom 5 and said it's much faster than its predecessor. However, I don't have the same experience as them. I find it marginally faster than before. It could be because that I am running it on MacBook Air that I bought almost three years ago (Core 2 Duo!). So I would assume anybody has a current mainstream computer would enjoy the improvement.

Lightroom 5 offers a bunch of new features. Besides some of the small add-ons like video slide show, location-based organisation. There are three features I think are worth introducing in this post. This will greatly enhance the post-process of your photos.

Radial Gradient

First is the radial gradient. Previous generations of Lightroom only offers linear gradient functions. It has been a great function in editing. The addition of radial gradient makes this even more useful. 

Changing the saturation to negative, it can make the subject stand out

Adjusting the exposure to negative, the subject in the centre of the radial filter will be standing out (thought that could be achieved using vignette effect).

Upright

The second feature is Upright. Lightroom 5 will auto-analyse the picture and adjust to the upright perspective. It is extremely useful for landscape and building photos since many times we may not have photo at perfect level or vertically it is not in the same plate.  Below are some examples how this function can help solve the problem

I took this photo around Chinatown, Singapore and you can see that the photo was taken from lower perspective (I am not tall enough! :( ). After the adjustment, the photo looks like as if it were taken from the same level.

This was taken in front of the Grand Place in Cambodia, I was trying to capture the flying pigeons so I didn't notice my photo is tilted. After the Upright adjustment, it loos much better. It may seem only some rotation is done, but if you take a closer look, you can see the road line is straightened as well. 

Advanced Healing Brush

The last one is powerful! If you have used Photoshop before, you'll be amazed how its healing brush works. It can smartly remove the subject and keep the background clean as if it never existed. And this advanced healing brush has come to Lightroom 5! You are empowered!

In the photo above it is actually good to have some figure in the foreground, so here is just an illustration of how it works. All you have to do is to apply the healing brush on the subject and it will be replaced by the similar background! Isn't this great? though you may need to try a few times to get the best result.

This is what I have got with Lightroom 5 so far. For sure there are many more to explore and I will share with you guys when I find out that. Also please let me know in the comment if you have tried out Lightroom 5 and found any interesting bits.

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