The immensely powerful Photoshop Lightroom 5 brings you professional, non-destructive, colour correction tools and slick photo management all in one place - here are 10 things you may not know about it...
Photoshop Lightroom 5 is a photographer's dream – it includes a vast amount of editing and management features to improve your shooting workflow. What’s more, as it's part of Creative Cloud, you can be sure it works brilliantly with Photoshop CC and Premiere Pro CC.
01. Advanced Healing Brush
The Advanced Healing Brush tool in Photoshop Lightroom 5 makes it extremely easy to remove dust spots, blemishes and other flaws from your images. Of course you can change the brush size - but you can also move the brush in precise paths.
02. Smart Previews
Smart Previews are very cool - meaning you can work with smaller stand-in files of your full-size images without taking your huge library of photos with you. Generate smaller versions, work on them, and any adjustments or metadata additions you make to these files will automatically be applied to the originals. Smart, indeed.
03. Upright!
With the new Upright tool you can easily straighten tilted images with a single click. The tool analyses images and detects skewed horizontal and vertical lines, even straightening shots where the horizon is hidden. Now isn’t that handy!
04. Video slide shows
If you want to showcase or share your work with clients or collaborators, using the excellent slideshow functionality in Lightroom it’s a cinch. You can combine still images, video clips, and music in HD videos that can be viewed on almost any computer or device.
05 Organise by location
In Lightroom 5 you can easily find, group, and tag images by location, or plot a photo journey. Lightroom will automatically display location data from GPS-enabled cameras and camera phones. Great for travel photographers.
06. The Radial Gradient tool
The new Radial Gradient tool enables you to create off-centre vignette effects or multiple vignetted areas in a single image. This adds up to more creative flexibility - you can emphasise different areas of your images with ease.
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07. Integrated with Photoshop
Of course, Lightroom 5 is tightly integrated with Photoshop CC. For instance, you can select one or multiple photos and automatically open them in Photoshop to perform detailed, pixel-level editing, and then see your results immediately back in Photoshop Lightroom.
08. Selective adjustment brushes
Want to use a brush to selectively edit parts of an image? No problem. With Lightroom 5 you can easily adjust brightness, contrast, white balance, sharpness, noise reduction, moiré removal, and much more using a familiar, brush-based tool.
09. Better photo books
If you’re looking to print and share your imagery in books, you can do it directly from Lightroom 5. Easy-to-use and highly-editable templates combined with a 25 per cent discount on your first Blurb book created in Lightroom make it a feature worth experimenting with.
10. Great noise reduction
Noise is a nightmare - but luckily with Lightroom 5 you can reduce it significantly with its powerful noise reduction technology. Naturally, you can apply noise reduction to the entire image, or use it selectively.
