Following the release of a public beta nearly two months ago, Adobe today announced immediate availability of the official release of Photoshop Lightroom 5, the company's professional photo management and manipulation software.
Adobe highlights six major new and improved features found in Lightroom 5, as well as a number of other smaller features designed to make the software more powerful and efficient than ever.
- Advanced Healing Brush: Remove distracting elements with a single brush stroke. Adjust the size of the brush and move it in precise paths. Unwanted objects and flaws—even those with irregular shapes like threads—just disappear.
- Upright tool: Straighten tilted images with a single click. The new Upright tool analyzes images and detects skewed horizontal and vertical lines, even straightening shots where the horizon is hidden.
- Radial Gradient tool: Emphasize important parts of your image with more flexibility and control. The Radial Gradient tool lets you create off-center vignette effects, or multiple vignetted areas within a single image.
- Smart Previews: Easily work with images without bringing your entire catalog of original images with you. Just generate smaller stand-in files called Smart Previews. Make adjustments or metadata additions to the Smart Previews and apply your changes to the full-size originals later.
- Improved photo book creation: Create beautiful photo books from your images. Lightroom includes a variety of easy-to-use book templates, and now you can edit them to create a customized look. Upload your book for printing with just a few clicks.
- Video slideshows: Easily share your work in elegant video slideshows. Combine still images, video clips, and music in creative HD videos that can be viewed on almost any computer or device.
Lightroom 5 is priced at $149 as a standalone purchase, with upgrading pricing of $79 available to current Lightroom users. Subscribers to Adobe's Creative Cloud service will also receive access to Lightroom 5 with their memberships.
Lightroom competes with Apple's Aperture software, which is available on the Mac App Store for $79.99. Each successive version of Aperture has seen Apple reduce pricing, moves that drove Adobe to slash the price of Lightroom in half to $149 with the release of Lightroom 4 last year. But with no sign of a new version of Aperture and Apple continuing to price Aperture 3 at $79.99, Adobe apparently remains comfortable with its $149 standard pricing on Lightroom while it also seeks to transition users to its Creative Cloud subscription services.
