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Archive 2013 · Lightroom 5 Review

  
 
thierryl
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p.1 #1 · p.1 #1 · Lightroom 5 Review


Just curious if anyone has tried out lightroom 5 yet? Is it worth the upgrade from 4?


Jun 12, 2013 at 11:54 AM
Bob Jarman
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p.1 #2 · p.1 #2 · Lightroom 5 Review


Amateur, maybe even advanced amateur. Nikon gear, shoot RAW, subject matter - what interests me.

I've tried the beta and have been unable to 'buy' upgrade from 4 online since the product release. Adobe's loss.

ITM I've explored the beta further, IMO, the 'clone' and 'heal' brushes are not anywhere close to being ready for primetime - crap really compared to CS6's polygon selection tool & content-aware patch tool which do the job right.

The circular/oval gradient tool is nice (guess we'll start seeing everything with an oval gradient applied now) but worth the price? Other things? Nice-to-have but certainly not essential. Other existing ways to do the same thing. And, sort of choppy-running on my home computer (AMD - 64, 4 core, Win7, 8GB) while LR4 & CS6 run fine.

Bottomline - I'll save my $79 and happily stay with LR4 and CS6.

Bob



Jun 12, 2013 at 12:17 PM
Bob Jarman
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p.1 #3 · p.1 #3 · Lightroom 5 Review


In fairness, I was able to download the trial version via a workaround - much closer to what is advertised in the demo videos so must re-evaluate. May tip the decision. Better opinion of clone/heal, but still not comparable to CS6 for other than area-based work.

Bob

And the circular gradient, works much like the lensbug in FocalPoint 2, with more parameters to adjust, so the basics are available should you already have FocalPoint 2



Jun 12, 2013 at 02:10 PM
bipock
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p.1 #4 · p.1 #4 · Lightroom 5 Review


I did the upgrade after watching some of the online training videos. Clone/heal tool is nowhere near as intelligent as the videos showed - in fact, half the time it's so far off it's not funny. "Masking" seems to really be buggy and slow.

Other than that, it's LR4.4 with a couple extras that may or may not interest you.

Bob's review is pretty spot on - choppy is a very, very good word for it.



Jun 12, 2013 at 02:54 PM
DmitriM
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p.1 #5 · p.1 #5 · Lightroom 5 Review


It's buggy for me. 8 bugs so far and counting. I am editing my last engagement session on the 5 and then switching back to 4.


Jun 12, 2013 at 03:15 PM
BigBadWolfie
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p.1 #6 · p.1 #6 · Lightroom 5 Review


Does anyone know if LR5's upright tool can be duplicated in CS6?


Jun 13, 2013 at 01:34 AM
butchM
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p.1 #7 · p.1 #7 · Lightroom 5 Review


BigBadWolfie wrote:
Does anyone know if LR5's upright tool can be duplicated in CS6?


No, though ACR 8.1 will be updated for PsCS6 so it can pass images from Lr5 to Ps via "Edit in" ... it will apply all the new settings available in Lr 5 ... though you won't be able to adjust any of those settings in CS6 ... it will still only have the RAW adjustments available to it in ACR 7.x when it shipped.

More details about ACR 8.1



Jun 13, 2013 at 06:08 AM
dhphoto
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p.1 #8 · p.1 #8 · Lightroom 5 Review


I have found the new version 5 really good

There is one caveat though, don't enable the lens profile until after you've done all the other editing as it slows the whole thing down.

The upright and level correcting is excellent IMHO as is the new healing brush, if you learn how to use it



Jun 13, 2013 at 06:49 AM
Bob Jarman
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p.1 #9 · p.1 #9 · Lightroom 5 Review


Bob Jarman wrote:
In fairness, I was able to download the trial version via a workaround - much closer to what is advertised in the demo videos so must re-evaluate. May tip the decision. Better opinion of clone/heal, but still not comparable to CS6 for other than area-based work.

Bob

And the circular gradient, works much like the lensbug in FocalPoint 2, with more parameters to adjust, so the basics are available should you already have FocalPoint 2



Quoting oneself? Hmm

For completeness - test driving the release version is much better than beta. Clone tool still inadequate for my needs (e.g. replacing a missing cedar-shake on a farmhouse roof ridge line). I want to say faster and better color rendition but perhaps wishful thinking. Coupled in all Nik/Google and OnOne plugins, loaded all 4.4 presets, did not import catalog (somewhere I think I read this is not a reversible operation so where does that leave a 4.4 installation?).

I'll upgrade (Adobe hosed at 'Checkout' stage) but through B&H - phone wait was 11/2 - 13/4 hours last evening.

Recommendation - as said by others, test drive yourself to see if additions are worth the price.

Bob



Jun 13, 2013 at 07:39 AM
BigBadWolfie
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p.1 #10 · p.1 #10 · Lightroom 5 Review


Don't mean to hijack the thread but I'm on the fence in terms of upgrading as well. I have CS6 and based on the impressions so far, it seems the healing tool isn't a good reason for me so far. That leaves the upright tool. How good is the upright tool? Is it worth upgrading to LR5 just for the upright tool?


Jun 15, 2013 at 08:32 AM
Alan321
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p.1 #11 · p.1 #11 · Lightroom 5 Review


I was most favourably impressed by the "upright" perspective tool which is very handy for squaring up documents and product boxes that I photograph because a flat surface photographed at an angle to avoid reflections ends up looking right as if I had photographed it square-on. It's not perfect, and in some cases it won't work at all (especially if it sees text at different angles such as on the vertical and top faces of a box), but it usually helps a lot.

It would be far nicer if I could pinpoint the four corners of a photographed document and tell it to square it up with a ratio that matches the original document (e.g. for A4 or whatever). However, the tool is fully automated and does not allow this. Great if it works as you would hope but no good when it gets confused. You see, one of the problems is that it looks at the entire image and cannot be restricted to look at just the bit that you want it to work with.

Something like DxO Viewpoint may be better in some ways but it creates separate edited files whereas the upright tool does not have to.


Because I use a laptop with external drives for primary photo storage I am also interested in the new smart previews for when I want to go portable for more than just a few hours at a time, but I have not yet tried it. I'm hoping to have smart previews on an internal SSD and so be able to look at or edit any of my images while out and about without taking the external storage with me.


Importing a Lr 4.4 catalog is probably not reversible but that is not an issue because Lr makes a separate copy, leaving the older one intact. It does, however, mess up the previews or at least re-use them and so it might pay to make a separate copy for Lr 5 to play with. At one stage I saw some yucky artifacts in an image that Lr 5 had brought across from Lr 4 but they disappeared when I viewed other images and then came back to the problem image. It was then that I decided to have Lr 5 build its own previews from scratch, just in case.

I dare say that Lr 5 would also mess with .xmp files with or within image files but I set Lr to avoid them and so that did not concern me. I rely instead on the Lr catalog database and back it up often to different media.


For now I am running Lr 4 and Lr 5. I've still got over three weeks before I need to pay to get a licence for Lr 5 and I am hoping that by then any major defects will be well known and I can weigh them up against the advantages before deciding to abandon Lr 4.

- Alan



Jun 16, 2013 at 10:09 AM





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