Adobe has upgraded its Photoshop Lightroom app along with its analogous mobile apps on iOS and Android. For the first time ever, the app is now available on Android tablets.
“We see the connected workflow as the future of photography. You need your photos everywhere you are so you can do meaningful work on them, not just for sending across networks. We see Creative Cloud as the empowering technology that lets us do that,” Sharad Mangalick, Adobe’s digital imaging product manager told TNW.
The new upgrade centres on issues that are performance-related. Under the hood upgrades, which now takes advantage of the latest graphics processors, are designed for better performance with 4K and 5K displays, with the performance boost most noticeable in the app’s Develop module.
“Anytime you adjust the slider, you should not see anything loading,” Mangalick said. “You would see that in the past with Raw files on a 4K monitor. Now, regardless of where you use the software, you will see crisp, buttery rendering — no waiting.”
Another major aspect of the upgrade made to Lightroom 6 is the speed, which is now as fast as your monitor can refresh and is not dependent on computer speed. For MacBook Air integrated graphics processors, the Lightroom 6 still leverages the GPU.
With the new HDR Merge, you can create images from the natural-looking to surreal, and from extremely high-contrast scenes. It also allows you to easily combine multiple shots taken at different exposure settings into a single HDR image. This feature works in the Raw space, allowing you to use as few as two images to achieve the effect.
“We can go from something that I can’t capture in a single frame to a DNG file that has the data from [multiple] stops of dynamic range,” Mangalick said.
The new Panorama Merge also allows you to capture a hugely wide fields of view and stitch together multiple images, including Raw files, to create detailed panoramas in the background as you continue to work on other Lightroom tasks.
Adobe has also update the slideshow feature so that you can combine still images, video, and music alongside effects such as pan and zoom (a Ken Burns effect derivative). You can also add up to 10 songs to slideshows and output HTML5 Web Module galleries.
Other enhancements made to Lightroom 6 include new metadata filtering options, pet eye correction, CMYK soft proof support and the ability to import directly into collections.
