Fuji X-Pro1

Adobe has released the first beta version of their popular photo editing and library management tool – Adobe Lightroom, which now reached version 5. This update includes all the features in Lightroom 4, especially the new cameras added in the 4.4 update. I am a long time user of Lightroom, and have used it as my photo editing tool of choice for both my Canon DSLRs and my new Fuji cameras. I really like the integrated approach Lightroom has for both image library management, keywording, image adjustment (the main photo editing module) and printing or exporting. For me Adobe Lightroom has almost replaced Photoshop, for most of my images. I say almost because some image adjustments could only be done in Photoshop. At least until Lightroom 5.

Important updates:

- upgraded spot removal tool (with brush system)

- offline images editing

- auto-adjustments to straighten photos

- new tool: radial gradient filter – the best thing since, well…linear gradients

- support for a ton of new cameras, of interest to me being the Fuji X-E1 and X100s

Will I get the Lightroom 5 upgrade? Let’s start the beta test......

By now you have probably heard about Adobe’s decision to stop development of Adobe Creative Suite (which includes such software as Photoshop and Illustrator) and move to a completely different subscription-only model. In short, Adobe does not want to sell packaged versions of its software anymore and wants you to instead pay for select software packages or the whole Creative Suite on a monthly basis. For example, today you can purchase Adobe Photoshop CS6 for $599 and own the software, which means that you can install it on your computer and use it whenever you want without limitations. With the new Adobe pricing strategy, you will no longer be able to purchase Photoshop that way – you will have to get a $20 per month subscription for using Photoshop alone (or $50 for the whole Creative Suite). There will be no other option. Software will be delivered over the Internet and once you get it installed, it will make occasional requests over the Internet to Adobe.com to verify your subscription level. Creative Cloud will work the same way that CS6 works today, except it will require an active subscription. When traveling without any Internet connectivity, the software will work for a limited amount of time (something like 30 days) before ceasing to work and requiring you to connect to the Internet.Our readers might be wondering what we at Photography Life think about Adobe’s new pricing policy, so here is my personal take. I think this is by far the most arrogant and selfish decision on behalf of Adobe. While I actively use Photoshop, Illustrator and Lightroom software for my work, I am already considering alternatives at this point. Not because I find the pricing to be too high, but because I think what Adobe is doing is simply wrong. Read on to find out why.

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What Adobe should have done, is give its customer two options – a boxed version with an upgrade path, essentially continuing the Creative Suite line, and a choice to go to the cloud. People that would benefit from collaboration and other benefits of the cloud would choose a subscription model, while everyone else would stay happy with their “owned” copies of the software.

A little more than a year ago, Adobe released its most recent major update to Photoshop Lightroom -- the company's flagship photography workflow application -- after a two-month open beta program. Today, the company takes the wraps off a beta release of the followup, continuing a tradition of public beta that stretches right back to Lightroom's formative days. The latest Lightroom 5 betabrings several interesting new features, including a radial gradient tool, a more advanced healing brush and a clever automatic perspective correction tool. But for our money, the feature which stands out is support for offline image editing, or what Adobe calls Smart Previews.

If you're one of the many photographers who take advantage of Adobe's license terms allowing use of a desktop and laptop on the same Lightroom license, chances are you've hit a certain dilemma. You're out in the field with the laptop, yet you want to browse your existing catalog and perhaps tweak a few photos -- but you've not brought the catalog's contents with you. The laptop drive doesn't have enough storage space for all your photos, and you didn't think you'd need to carry your bulky external drives with you. Or perhaps you're not even using external drives -- maybe your catalog is shared across the network from your desktop machine. Either way, you don't have access to the files you need. That's the problem Smart Previews aims to solve. Lightroom 5 public beta can automatically generate reduced-resolution copies of your images on external drives and network shares, suitable for the smaller storage space available on your laptop. And it will let you edit these images just as if the files were online. Of course, some edits won't be meaningful on reduced-res previews. For example, you'll likely want to forgo tools like noise reduction and sharpening, where information at the pixel level is key. However, for many tools such as cropping, tweaking color and so on, that reduced-resolution file will still be enough to get the job done, or at least to get you in the ballpark while an editing idea is fresh in your mind. The clever bit happens when the offline media comes back online -- go back into the images, and your edits are applied to the originals automatically. This is very clever stuff, and something we have a feeling many photographers will welcome with open arms.....