Free Lightroom 5 Public Beta Is Sure to Make Users Happy
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Adobe announced the release of Lightroom 5 in a public beta version that is free…or at least until the company releases a full version, scheduled for July 2013. A recent PhotographyTalk.com article, 7 Excellent Reasons Adobe Lightroom Is for Photographers, argued that Lightroom may be a better software option for photographers than Photoshop. The upgrades to the beta version of Lightroom 5 would seem to support our point-of-view.
The following changes to Lightroom should appeal to many photographers, both professionals and hobbyists and enthusiasts. Many of the improved features were based on photographers’ comments and feedback.
Spot Removal Tool – It’s now customizable, so you can select an icon other than the familiar circle. Various icons match the kind of photograph you’re editing. For example, choose the person-shaped icon, which will allow you to delete a human figure with just one stroke. This new tool also works well when you want to retouch portraits because the opacity slider makes for a smooth, uninterrupted transition between edited and unedited areas.
Another improvement to the Spot Removal Tool is the ability to remove large expanses of scenery or a foreground object, for example, in a landscape, which is then filled with seamless background. Third party tests of Lightroom 5’s public beta version revealed that this specific use of the Spot Removal Tool worked much faster and caused no damage to the remaining portions of an image.
Spot Highlighting Tool – Dust and other surface aberrations are more clearly visible, so they can be erased with the Spot Removal Tool, resulting in clean, beautiful large prints.
Radial Gradient Tool – Emphasize a specific portion of an image to give it more impact, which is more likely to attract and capture viewers’ attention. You can also precisely control the blending of the edited and unedited portions of the image.
Upright Tool – You won’t have to discard images with certain distortions and/or horizon skewing. This new tool overcomes these flaws, so a strange looking distorted portrait (shot with the wrong lens or focal length) can be salvaged and become a customer keeper.
Smart Previews Mode – If you’re one of many photographers that use an external storage device for your RAW images, then you’ll love using the new Smart Previews Mode. With it, you’ll be able to create 2540-pixel lossy DNG copies of your RAW images. You can edit these images on another drive, although they are not stored there. Whatever edits you make are automatically saved to the preview version, but the originals don’t change until they are moved to the working drive. Many parameters can be edited, including exposure, contrast and tone mapping, and your images will still have an excellent visual quality even when you export them for Web use or to make prints.
Other upgrades to Lightroom 5 include PNG file support, custom page settings for photo books and new video slideshows.
System requirements for the public beta version of Lightroom 5 are Windows 7 or Window 8 on a PC, or Lion or Mountain Lion on MAC.
Click here to download Light 5 free public beta version, which will be operational through June 30, 2013.
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