Lightroom 6 cool features I've found already.

Number 1 I found was the "auto straighten" feature:

That "Auto" isn't in the previous version.

Then there's photo merge which has HDR and Panos

You select the photos you want to merge, right click > Photo Merge > Panorama (or HDR if you want).

After processing you get a preview:

You can try a different method if you wish, to see what you prefer (can't do that on PS):

You can also auto crop:

Final result:

HDR

I didn't have any bracketed burst shots, but I did have a couple of shots almost in the same location taken about 30 seconds apart.  Not ideal but let's see how LR does with this difficult circumstances (Note: I think using burst/bracketing would give you better results).

This is the images I was combining:

The interface:

Not bad.

After some levels tweaking:

It's not without errors:

 

See the weird artifacts?

Here too:

I did another one using 3 shots that I made no effort to try and get them aligned, but they were shot from the same standing position and same focal length (just different exposures):

Looks OK until you get closer:

Overall, I'm pretty sure I'll use the photomerge thing a lot.  I find that a bit better (albeit slightly less powerful, but more convenient than PS).  HDR I'm on the fence about.  I think it's pretty good for what it is and if I did burst shots with bracketing it would work quite nicely I suppose.  There isn't much haloing (which is good) but those strange artifacts and such are troubling.  More testing is needed IMHO (on HDR).

The auto align could be OK, I'll have to test that more.  It would be good for quick fixes perhaps... you can always adjust it if you don't like the results.

Here's the explanation of the artifacts in the HDR (and why you should use burst/bracketing) 

Firstly here's the two images that were combined 100% zoom:

Here's the composite:

You can see the different angles and sizes of objects (see the bin) and the extra people in the other one (mainly the dark areas around their pants etc.) have caused the problems.  

Using bracketing/burst will help alleviate these issues.

Basically I pushed the HDR merge feature too much.  Still it did an OK job IMHO.

Sooo . . . with the HDR deal you don't get to apply masks to the individual images?  To select which portions of the image to apply?

ohwell

KCook wrote: Sooo . . . with the HDR deal you don't get to apply masks to the individual images?  To select which portions of the image to apply?

ohwell

Can you do that in photoshop (I mean in the auto merge to HDR thing)? I don't really do them.

I've been trying to access Adobe's site this morning and it's VERY slow

From what I read last night, the advantage of the Lightroom's HDR is that the resulting image in .DNG.   Pretty nice.  That said, according to the video, many (not all) adjustments will be stripped.  I can see a couple options (without buy it yet)...but the easiest (which may work for some images) is to apply the mask, save as a TIFF or DNG, and then do the HDR.   Just a thought.

Will be downloading later today, thanks for sharing

Of course this is hitting all of the photog sites.  On FM a guy posted a sample where the PS HDR showed color banding, but with LR6 HDR the same subject showed almost no banding.

Kelly

Thanks for sharing this, I'm looking at it right now.  

KCook wrote: Of course this is hitting all of the photog sites.  On FM a guy posted a sample where the PS HDR showed color banding, but with LR6 HDR the same subject showed almost no banding.

Kelly

Yeh I want to try it out with some old shots I did years ago (with burst mode and bracketing) but that's on my home computer and I've not had a lot of time to do it.

Just downloaded, me likey!  

I'll be updating this, this weekend too.  I'm looking forward to playing around with it!

Good tip!

I think Adobe did a really good job with the latest release

The other new feature I really like and will probably use more often than HDR or pano is the new brush added to the Graduated Filter and Radial Filter so you can paint out areas you don't want affected, or paint in areas you do. Pretty handy.