Earlier today, Adobe officially launched Lightroom 4.3 and Camera Raw 7.3, an update that brings support for Apple Retina Displays (and other HiDPI high-res screens) to Lightroom. The news comes just a couple of days after Photoshop received its own HiDPI compatibility update.
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Photoshop guru Scott Kelby has high praise for the overhauled Develop Module that’s coming in Lightroom 4. In a recent post titled “Why I Think Lightroom 4 is Going To Sell Like Crazy“, he writes,
Your photos look better processed in Lightroom 4. Period. [...] The improvements in Lightroom’s Development module are so significant, and so much better than what we’ve ever had before, that I think you’ll be hard-pressed to find most anyone still using Lightroom 3 in just a few months from now. In fact, if they didn’t add another feature, it would still be worth the upgrade just to get better looking images.
You can watch a walkthrough of new the new module here, or play around with the new engine yourself by downloading the free Lightroom 4 Beta release. This is also great news for Photoshop users: the same engine is coming to Photoshop CS6 and Adobe Camera Raw.
(via Scott Kelby via John Nack)
Here’s a cool sneak peek at some of the new features coming to the next version of Adobe Camera Raw. The adjustment brushes will have powerful new options for local adjustments, including temperature, tint, and noise. We also get to see the new dark interface that’ll come by default with Photoshop CS6.
Although the new, rewritten processing engine for ACR7 isn’t available to the public, it’s the same engine found in Lightroom 4, which just became available as a free public beta download a couple weeks ago.
(via 1001 Noisy Cameras)
Tom Hogarty, the Lightroom product manager over at Adobe, has posted a sneak peek at the automatic lens correction technology that will be included in Lightroom 3 and Adobe Camera Raw 6 (included in CS5).
Using profiles for lenses that are either included or added by the user, the feature can automatically correct the distortion, chromatic aberration, and vignetting characteristics of particular lenses, helping you to “normalize” how your work looks across your various lenses.
John Ncak, the Photoshop product manager, writes on his blog:
With the introduction of killer new noise reduction, demosaicing algorithms, and sharpening plus sophisticated lens correction, the Lightroom/Camera Raw duo put even more distance between themselves and the competition, and I’d expect them to keep mopping the floor with Aperture among pro photographers.
As you can see from this quote and from recent events, Adobe and Apple absolutely love each other.
Here’s a pretty interesting sneak peek video showing you the lens correction technology in action:
After building up anticipation by releasing sneak peeks at upcoming features such as Content-Aware Fill and Puppet Warp, Adobe has unveiled Photoshop CS5, the latest version of its popular image editing program.
Photoshop CS5 and Photoshop CS5 Extended are expected to start shipping next month at the price of $699 and $999, respectively. If you already own Photoshop and only need the upgrade, it’ll set you back $149 or $349.
Here’s a quick overview of some of the new features:
Companies like HDRSoft (makers of Photomatix) can’t be too pleased about this one. Adobe claims to have greatly improved the HDR capabilities in this new version. In addition to greater speed and accuracy, they now have ghost artifact removal (to combat camera shake) and the ability to emulate the look of HDR using single photographs.
CS5 now features a painting module through which you can “paint” over a photograph. This feature flips photorealism around and allows you to turn your images into rather convincing paintings.
Instead of using an artistic filter, which can produce unreliable results, the painting tools allow for a more organic feel: the program shows a live view of the virtual brush tip as you paint.
Another major feature is almost a subtle addition compared to the other features, but it makes a huge difference in the way we can edit. Adobe is including a lens correction feature which corrects for distortion, chromatic aberration and vignetting based on what lens you used according to the EXIF data. The folks over at dpreview predict that CS5 will come with preset lens profiles – much like color profiles – for Nikon and Canon lenses. Photoshop also enables the ability to customize your own profiles with the possibility of sharing profiles with a larger community of users.
Adobe has also taken several pointers from community feedback with regards to the lens correction filter options.
Adobe Camera Raw 6 alone is plenty to get excited about. It uses the same processing engine as the Lightroom 3 beta and supports more than 275 camera models. It also allows nondestructive editing not only for raw files, but also for JPEG and TIFF.
There’s a new Grain feature which mimics the look of film grain, which provides an alternative to the film grain artistic filter, but is also nondestructive and can add an evenly dispersed grain to the entire image.
On the opposite spectrum, ACR also has improved noise removal controls that can prove quite handy when shooting at a high ISO.
In each iteration of Photoshop, Adobe has constantly improved its ability to distinguish edges for making selections and masking. CS5 has new adaptive selection-edge modification controls, such as Smart Radius, which selects the best edging style when selecting different types of subjects. Adobe has also added extra view modes to preview selections. The other features include Refine Radius and Erase Refinements, which can be particularly helpful when trying to reduce and remove background colors that show up through a subject’s hair.
Content-Aware Fill has received the most attention in CS5 preview coverage, and it’s no wonder why. This feature provides the ability to remove parts of a photograph and replace the void with a practically seamless filled area. You can either make a selection using Content-Aware Fill, or use the spot healing brush on the Content-Aware Fill setting.
Puppet Warp allows elements in a photograph to be convincingly repositioned using anchor points. Anchor points act like joints, and when appropriately placed, can be used to manipulate arms, legs, and other elements of an image composition. Like most of these new features, it’s another impressively powerful tool for creative individuals.
I was over at Lake Tahoe attending my brother’s soccer tournament this past weekend, and took this photograph from behind the opponent’s goal:
I corrected a few things in Adobe Camera RAW, and this is the resulting image (hover over it to compare):
The difference isn’t too big. I just corrected a few things, and addressed a tiny bit of clipping in certain areas.
At this point, I wanted the sky to be a little darker and for the clouds to be more dramatic. This is where the luminance tab comes in. All you need to do to instantly make the sky more interesting is drop the slider for aquas and blues. In this case, I decided to drop them both to -50 (I like simple numbers):
Here is what this simple edit does to the final photograph (hover over it to compare):
Pretty neat, huh? Play around with the luminance slider, and you can do pretty interesting things with skies.
