![]() ![]() There was a time that I objected to paying for a subscription, but my views have changed and I’m very happy with my Photography Plan that includes Lightroom Classic CC and Photoshop CC and 20GB of cloud storage (which I never use) for just over £100 a year, less than £10 a month. If you need Lightroom professionally, as I do, at this time I strongly recommend just biting the bullet and subscribing to Creative Cloud. That makes the original version of this article completely redundant unfortunately, and I’ve removed the links to Amazon, which used to be the last place you could get hold of it. I’ve looked around the usual places online and I’m afraid I can’t find anywhere that sells official copies of Adobe Lightroom 6, the last version of Lightroom that was available as a non-subscription standalone product. Stack Lightroom 6 next to the price of a new lens, or even a new filter, and it’s an easy upgrade to justify.The hammer has finally fallen. While the new HDR and panorama capabilities are currently a bit basic, it’s inspiring to have the options at your fingertips – and we suspect a fair few switchers will soon be wondering how they ever got by without editable filter masks and the new facial-recognition tools. In itself, Lightroom 6 doesn’t add up to a revolutionary update, but it does improve on what was already an exceptional piece of software. More commonly associated with the likes of Picasa and Facebook, it’s a feature that may seem superfluous to most serious snappers – but for those who cover weddings or celebrity events, it could be a tremendous time-saver. This means you can easily – for example – drag down a graduated filter to add depth and vibrancy to a drab sky, then manually mask out any protruding trees and buildings, to keep their natural exposure and tone.Īnother easily overlooked addition is automatic facial recognition, and the accompanying “Find similar faces” function. An inconspicuous update to the Graduated and Radial Filter tools now lets you edit their adjustment masks with a brush. In fact, it might be Lightroom 6’s more minor upgrades that have the biggest impact on your day-to-day workflow. A nine-photo panorama took just under six minutes to appear, slowing the rest of the system to an unusable crawl. On our Core i7-3770S test system, it still took three or four seconds for our 24-megapixel raw images to render at full zoom.Ĭreating an HDR preview from three bracketed images took 52 seconds, and a further minute to produce the final render. Make no mistake, though: photo-editing is still a weighty business. Alas, Dehaze is restricted currently to CC subscribers owners of the standalone edition won’t get to play with it until they pay to upgrade to the next version, or take out a Creative Cloud subscription.Īlso new in Lightroom 6 is GPU acceleration, and with our Intel HD Graphics 4400 GPU the Develop stage certainly felt more responsive than in the previous edition. It works pretty well in most circumstances if used carefully, but unwanted effects can occur in some circumstances, such as smudgy, unnatural-looking clouds. Again, the output is a DNG, so you can use Lightroom’s processing tools to non-destructively punch up the resulting image.ĭehaze, introduced in the 2015 update to Creative Cloud, is another new feature, adding a way to reduce the haze or fogging that shooting into the sun or a bright light can add to photographs. Thankfully, our results proved impressively consistent, with even quite widely spaced shots stitching seamlessly together: only in one case did we need to export the image into Photoshop to tidy up a glitch. You can’t even zoom into the preview to check for boundary mismatches – although that’s perhaps academic, as there are no tools for fixing them anyway. ![]() On opening the preview window you’ll see very few options: just three different projections and an auto-crop tool. It’s a similar story with the panorama feature. It’s just a shame that the merge module can only produce 8-bit DNGs: a 16-bit option, as found in Photoshop, would have left you more subtle tonal detail to work with. Of course, this is Lightroom, so if the combined image doesn’t have the desired HDR glow, you can always apply non-destructive processing to perfect it after the fact. Where Photoshop’s HDR Pro module gives you extensive control over the tone of your merged image, here you get only a few tickboxes and a choice of four deghosting levels. At first glance, these look pretty basic.
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