ADOBE Lightroom has been our favourite photo editor ever since we first clapped eyes on version 1. Adobe already had Raw processing in the bag with its Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) engine for Photoshop, and Lightroom packaged it with elegant library management, printing and sharing facilities.
Version 6 brings relatively modest changes to the image-editing tools. It’s now possible to modify the shape of a linear or radial graduated filter using brush strokes, which is ideal for darkening skies without inadvertently also darkening the tallest trees in a scene.
Lightroom has previously worked only on individual photos, but this update opens up the possibility to merge them. An HDR mode aligns and merges exposure-bracketed photos to produce an image with expanded dynamic range. There’s minimal control over the process, with options to auto-align, auto-tone and de-ghost to remove repetitions of moving subjects. Enabling the latter for jPEGs resulted in some peculiar colour shifts and heavy noise, but it worked fine for Raw files.
Colour-processing merged HDR images is initially automatic, but it’s delivered non-destructively through Lightroom’s filters so it’s easy to undo any changes. HDR merging often veers towards surreal overblown contrast, but the automatic results look surprisingly natural. For a more dramatic effect, it’s usually just a matter of turning up the Clarity and Vibrance controls. You can also deselect Auto-tone and colour-correct from scratch.
Panorama stitching also makes its debut. Alignment and stitching is automatic, save for an auto-crop feature and options to build the composite image using three algorithms (Spherical, Cylindrical or Perspective) for a choice of fish-eye or rectilinear results.
Stitching 25 16-megapixel photos took 10 minutes, during which time our PC was very slow to respond. Windows Task Manager revealed that it was our 8GB of RAM rather than the Core i7 870 processor causing a bottleneck. The resulting 164-megapixel DNG file was responsive to manipulate, though.
STITCHING TIME
We’ve previously had great success stitching hundreds of photos with the free Microsoft ICE utility. ICE took less than two minutes to stitch the same set of 25 photos, and only used 2GB of RAM. However, Lightroom has the advantage of being able to stitch Raw files and process colours and details afterwards.
The underlying Raw processing engine remains unchanged, but that’s fine by us. Lightroom’s Raw processing is one of the best, with precise colour correction, superb detail enhancement and noise reduction and a massive database of lens profiles to tackle lens distortion and vignetting.
Lightroom isn’t just about photo processing; there are new photo-management features, too. A People view identifies faces in photos and allows the user to name them. It quickly began to identify the same faces in other photos within a set, and requested that we click to confirm each one. The interface is elegant, with the ability to see all the unnamed faces in a folder or collection, sort by suspected matches to a particular person or show all the unidentified faces in a photo. However, recognition of faces was often fairly wayward, and many faces were missed altogether. Recognition of family and friends would probably improve the more photos that were added, but we’re not sure that we could be bothered to persevere with it.
Lightroom’s web export facilities felt fairly redundant, with exports in Flash format and users left to find their own web-hosting service. Flash has now been replaced by HTML5, but the ability to host exported files on Adobe’s servers is only available to Creative Cloud subscribers. They also get access to the Lightroom iOS and Android apps that provide basic editing and synchronisation of Collections with the web and the desktop app. It seems pretty stingy that people who buy Lightroom outright are excluded. Then again, the Creative Cloud Photography Plan bundles Lightroom and Photoshop CC for £103 per year, so going for a subscription rather than a perpetual licence may not be such a bad idea.
INTERFACE OFF
The interface has a couple of minor irritations. Folders are shown in tree view if they’re imported that way, but otherwise it’s by disk and then alphabetically. Search and filter facilities are comprehensive, but we’d prefer more flexible options to sort the library. The software doesn’t allow duplicate files to be imported twice when they’ve been copied to a new location. There may be some sense to this but we’d like to have the option. These issues are few and far between, though. Overall, Lightroom is polished, efficient and well equipped to meet photographers’ needs.
Less than £100 is remarkably good value for such a powerful application, and £59 to upgrade from version 5 isn’t bad either. It’s the Creative Cloud Photography Plan that gets our warmest recommendation, though. Most people will also need a layer-based editor for montages and design projects. In the past we’ve recommended Photoshop Elements, but at current prices it makes more sense to rent Photoshop CC and Lightroom. Ben Pitt
A relatively modest update, but Lightroom still sets the standard for Raw processing.