Lightroom 5 Beta Features - Hal's Favorites

The three part video demonstrates and discusses my favorite features of the Lightroom 5 beta.  The full feature list is below but my favorites are: Improved spot removal and retouching, the Radial Filter, improved crop overlay, import functionality, Smart Previews, and Upright for auto lens corrections.

In the video I reference additional keyboard shortcuts for the Spot Removal and Radial Filter tools.  The shortcuts are shown below.

Spot Removal (Q)

-New circle spot (auto-find source): Single click

-New circle spot (user-defined source): Ctrl drag

-New circle spot (scale from center): Ctrl Alt drag

-New circle spot (scale from anchor): Ctrl Shift drag

-Connect two circle spots: Single click + Shift click

-Increase circle spot size: ]

-Decrease circle spot size: [

-New brush spot: Click drag

-Constrain brush spot to straight line: Shift drag

-Cycle Spot Type: Shift + Q

-Auto-Find New Source: /

-Visualize Spots: A

-Hide Spot Overlays: H

-Delete spot: Alt select

-Delete selected spot: Delete

-Delete multiple spots: Alt drag select

Radial Filter (Shift + M)

-New elliptical mask: Drag

-Apply new mask to crop bounds: Ctrl double-click

-Expand existing mask to crop bounds: Ctrl double-click on mask

-Duplicate: Ctrl Alt drag

-Invert elliptical mask: ’ (apostrophe)

-Hide/show guide: H (short press)

-Hide guide on press, show on release: H (long press)

-Apply & dismiss: Double-click on photo

-Delete selected elliptical mask: Delete

Major feature list

-Smart Previews

-PNGs now supported in Lightroom

-New fullscreen mode.  F key is true full screen.  Legacy full screen mode is Shift + F

-Configurable grid overlays for Loupe view

-New searchable criteria for Smart Collections - File size, Image size, Image bit depth, color channels, Color mode, Color profile, Smart Preview statsus, and PNG

-Advanced healing brush for Spot Removal

-Radial Filter

-Upright auto lens corrections

-LAB color readout on histogram.  Right click on the histogram for a flyout menu.

-New book features

I will do additional videos to show some of these upgrade features.

Fiat Lux!

Lightroom 4 Beta Quick Look

Adobe released the Lightroom 4 Beta earlier today and this video is a quick first look at the major changes in the program that relate to still photos.  I used a fairly broad brush to cover the changes and will go more into detail as the Beta test progresses.

Unfortunately, not a single one of my main upgrade requests is included in version 4 of the program.  Regardless, there are some interesting and useful new features and functions. 

I think the new Book module will be very useful to many users.  Adobe partnered with Blurb and it is now very simple to layout a photo book design.  For those that do not use or have not used Blurb you can also export the book to PDF. 

There is also a Map module for use with geo locating or geo tagging your images. It's pretty cool.

Inside the Develop Module, the Basic tab changed (more detail in the video), there are more options for local adjustments, and CA removal has been simplified (although I have not found it to work all that well.) Soft proofing was also added to the Develop Module for use in prepping an output file.

There are some very large changes to video handling and optimization.  I did not have the time in this quick look to go through them.  But if you do video, you will like them.

I will discuss more regarding the Beta soon.

Fiat Lux!