
This means you can easily – for example – drag down a graduated filter to add depth and vibrancy to a drab sky, then manually mask out any protruding trees and buildings, to keep their natural exposure and tone.Īnother easily overlooked addition is automatic facial recognition, and the accompanying “Find similar faces” function.
#Upgrade to lightroom 6 update
An inconspicuous update to the Graduated and Radial Filter tools now lets you edit their adjustment masks with a brush. In fact, it might be Lightroom 6's more minor upgrades that have the biggest impact on your day-to-day workflow. A nine-photo panorama took just under six minutes to appear, slowing the rest of the system to an unusable crawl.
#Upgrade to lightroom 6 full
On our Core i7-3770S test system, it still took three or four seconds for our 24-megapixel raw images to render at full zoom.Ĭreating an HDR preview from three bracketed images took 52 seconds, and a further minute to produce the final render. Make no mistake, though: photo-editing is still a weighty business. Lightroom 6 review: performanceĪlso new in Lightroom 6 is GPU acceleration, and with our Intel HD Graphics 4400 GPU the Develop stage certainly felt more responsive than in the previous edition. Again, the output is a DNG, so you can use Lightroom's processing tools to non-destructively punch up the resulting image. Thankfully, our results proved impressively consistent, with even quite widely spaced shots stitching seamlessly together: only in one case did we need to export the image into Photoshop to tidy up a glitch. You can't even zoom into the preview to check for boundary mismatches – although that's perhaps academic, as there are no tools for fixing them anyway. On opening the preview window you'll see very few options: just three different projections and an auto-crop tool. It's a similar story with the panorama feature. It's just a shame that the merge module can only produce 8-bit DNGs: a 16-bit option, as found in Photoshop, would have left you more subtle tonal detail to work with. Of course, this is Lightroom, so if the combined image doesn't have the desired HDR glow, you can always apply non-destructive processing to perfect it after the fact. Where Photoshop's HDR Pro module gives you extensive control over the tone of your merged image, here you get only a few tickboxes and a choice of four deghosting levels. It does however open up new creative options, not least with a new pair of photomerge tools that let you stack and blend images into HDR and panoramic scenes.Īt first glance, these look pretty basic.

The underlying image-processing engine hasn't changed, so if you're happy with Lightroom 5, the new version won't make your photos look any better.

#Upgrade to lightroom 6 upgrade
Whether the upgrade is worthwhile depends on your ambitions. We will not share your details with third parties. I have read and accept the privacy policy and terms and conditions and by submitting my email address I agree to receive the Business IT newsletter and receive special offers on behalf of Business IT, nextmedia and its valued partners.
