Tech Tuesday: 6 New Features in Lightroom 5

April 23, 2013

By Laura Brauer

Adobe Lightroom Version 5 isn’t a major overhaul of Lightroom, but there are some very useful—and kinda cool—updates and additions. They include:

  • Smart Previews—you can leave those external hard drives at the studio with slightly larger Smart Previews (lossy DNG) for offline editing. Update the originals quickly and easily by reconnecting your external storage device
  • Advanced Healing Brush—no longer limited to a spot healing/clone circle, use this adjustable brush to paint away unwanted elements or heal blemishes (got dust? use the Visualize Spots option to get rid of ‘it)
  • Upright—this quick and easy tool makes short work of straightening tilted images and skewed perspectives.
  • Radial Gradient Tool—great for localized adjustments as well as single or multiple vignettes
  • Video Slideshows—go multimedia in Lightroom by combining stills, videos and music in the Slideshow module
  • Improved Photo Book Creation—here you’ll get a little more flexibility with layouts and you can save your favorite layouts to be used again for your next project.

There are smaller improvements, too, like PNG file support, true full screen mode, Windows HiDPI, configurable grid overlays, an aspect slider for Manual Lens Corrections, keyboard shortcut to toggle between heal and clone modes, among many others.

Check out Lightroom 5 yourself with Adobe’s public beta—and give it your constructive criticism. The public beta, which expires on June 30th, is free and available for immediate download here.