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New Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Announced
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Adobe has announced a new update to Photoshop Lightroom. This part of the Photoshop family of products adds more capabilities for professional photographers and digital photography enthusiasts. Adobe is likely to see a growing number of photographers move to Photoshop Lightroom as Apple has stopped updating its Aperture product, replacing it with the consumer-level tool, Photos.
The new capabilities added with this version of Photoshop Lightroom include:
New High Dynamic Range (HDR) functionality. Images taken at different exposure levels can be easily merged together to create an HDR image. Tools to remove ghosting which can occur between two images, such as an item that has moved, are incorporated into this.
A panorama merge function lets you stitch together several photos into a single image, such as several photos taken across a wide landscape. When merging the images into a panorama, Photoshop Elements lets you select a perspective to use for the newly merged panorama, selecting from perspective, cylindrical, or spherical options.
Photoshop Lightroom also adds facial recognition to help with cataloging and organizing large number of images. You can then later search for images that contain specific people.
The new filter brush provides the ability to determine where effects are applied to an image and where they aren’t – effectively masking the image, providing gradients so that effects transition from the location where they are not applied to the portions of an image that are affected.
The new slideshow capabilities include options for integrating music, and panning within an image, similar to the Photo viewing effects available within Apples screen saver.
The best has been saved for last, with dramatic performance improvements. The latest version of Photoshop Lightroom utilizes a special chip that is built into many more advanced computers, the graphics processing unit, or GPU. By placing graphics tasks onto a computer chip designed specifically to work with graphics, tasks such as scrolling through a large number of thumbnails, panning within a large image or when zoomed-in on an image, occur with much greater speed. This improved speed will have the biggest impact on most professionals that use Photoshop Lightroom.
The new capabilities of Photoshop Lightroom will be included in the Photoshop courses dedicated to learning this app. Photoshop Lightroom is available as a stand-alone product that you can use indefinitely, or as a product that you can license on either a monthly or annual basis. The stand-alone version of Photoshop Lightroom, sometimes called a perpetual license, will be $150 while the monthly subscription for Photoshop and Photoshop Lightroom is $10 per month. If the stand-alone version is purchased, there are no monthly fees or renewal licenses required.