Adobe gives Lightroom CC/6 speed boost, facial recognition, RAW panos and RAW HDRs
posted Tuesday, April 21, 2015 at 4:56 PM EST
Adobe Unveils Lightroom CC: Speed Boost, RAW HDR and Pano, Face Finding, and More
Adobe has announced the release of its latest version of Adobe Lightroom. This time around, they’ve split the exact same program into two different iterations, one for its subscription-based Creative Cloud service and a standalone program that can be purchased on its own. The programs are called Lightroom CC and Lightroom 6, respectively.
Besides the split in names, Adobe has brought a handful of impressive changes to the updated software. Below is a brief rundown of the new features and performance upgrade.
In the performance department, Adobe claims to have made a 10x performance increase by leveraging the GPU hardware present in your machine, something Lightroom has never done before.
In the creative realm, HDR Merge is just one of new capabilities present in the update. HDR Merge enables you to create HDR photographs directly in Lightroom. You can even merge multiple RAW files to create a RAW DNG file.
Facial recognition is yet another feature Adobe has included in Lightroom CC/6. As with Apple’s Photos, Lightroom will now recognize and categorize faces from portraits into dedicated albums for easy access.
Panorama Merge, a feature that has long been available in Photoshop, is now present inside of Lightroom. As with the HDR merge, you can now export the final image as a RAW DNG for finer control.
If you’re a fan of filters, a new Filter Brush feature might be right up your alley. If you’re not a fan of the filtered look across the entire image, you can now ‘paint’ filters where you see fit.
Beyond the notable features mentioned above, Adobe has included a lot of tweaks, fixes and changes to improve the post-production workflow from beginning to end. Adobe has created a short video, shown below, that points out just a few of these smaller adjustments.
As mentioned above, the updated version comes in two flavors: Adobe Lightroom CC and Adobe Lightroom 6. The ‘CC’ version is available via Adobe’s Creative Cloud plans, which start at $10/month for the Photography plan — which also includes Photoshop CC. If you prefer to own the program, you can purchase Adobe 6 as a standalone program for $149.