If you aren’t using Adobe Lightroom for your photo editing, you’re probably working too hard to get high quality results. Sally’s workflow for her fine art exhibition photos starts with Lightroom, where she does most of her photo editing; she uses Photoshop very little these days, and primarily for compositing/collaging or to add artistic typography.

Since its introduction in 2007, every new version of Lightroom has added invaluable new features and improved functionality that has made photography so much easier (and potentially more creative). Lightroom 5 appears to be living up to this tradition. We say appears, because we haven’t yet tested it, though the demo Adobe gave us looked very promising.

Among the 50 or so new features and improvements, they highlighted:

• Spot Healing Brush improvements


• New Radial filter


• Smart previews

Adobe is marketing the improved Spot Healing Brush as an “advanced healing brush,” which may prove to be initially confusing. No, it isn’t Photoshop’s Healing Brush, because the new underlying algorithms are based on working with RAW data rather than Photoshop’s rendered images. First of all, it’s a true brush. Instead of being (more…)