Smart folders can be created on any device - your laptop, your phone, or your tablet - and they will instantly appear everywhere else. One other major thing Adobe has done with Lightroom 6 is made library syncing work across all your devices.

Right now only a few phones can do that, like the OnePlus One and the Nexus 5 or 6. There's also DNG editing support on some devices running Android Lollipop - but only on DNG images taken by phones with that capability. Other features announced today are the addition of facial recognition and finer control over the graduated filter tool. Lightroom spends a full second or more before you see a fully rendered version of the image you want to edit, so you're still going to want to use another program if you want to quickly inspect the full quality of your images.Īdobe has added a few new features, the most notable ones being 'HDR merge' and 'panorama merge.' While HDR and panorama tools aren't revolutionary, these particular ones generate rich DNG files that can be edited without worrying much about quality loss (as opposed to working like a JPEG, which can degrade quickly). Rendering RAW images still takes some time, though.

The new Lightroom is faster, but it still crawls here and there Importing a large batch of images into your Lightroom catalog is also faster, but it still takes long enough that you might want to use the time to walk away from your computer or check Twitter. The biggest improvements are found in the rendering speed of the 'exposure' and 'distort' tools - changes made with these appeared much faster in the preview build of Lightroom 6 I used. Even if you're using a MacBook Pro from four years ago, you'll still see an improvement in the overall performance and the speed of individual tools. Lightroom 6's performance is based heavily on your computer's GPU and processing power, but Adobe is promising speed increases on most modern machines. The biggest change in this version of Lightroom is speed.

It's been almost two years since Lightroom 5 was released, which at the time was a major update to the photo editing program's look and performance. But the excitement should be tempered, because the new version is really more of an update than a revolution. It's available as part of an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription - where it's called 'Lightroom CC' - and as standalone software. Photographers and photo editors are about to hear some long-awaited news: Lightroom 6 is now available.

Adobe lightroom 5 release date