>From Cult of Mac:
"Lightroom 5 beta has just been posted, and is ready for download and
testing. Those of you who read my article last week about using a small,
SSD-based MacBook Air for photos will be very interested in one new
feature: Smart Previews. This lets you edit your photos using just the
previews on your MacBook, and the changes all sync up to your actual photos
next time you connect your big external drive.
And there’s more.
Here’s a quick list of the new features:
- Advanced Healing Brush
- Upright
- Radial Gradient
- Smart Previews
- Improved Photo Book Creation
- Slideshows with Videos and Still Images
Upright is an auto-crop an perspective correction tool which is like magic
for people who can’t hold their camera straight.
Radial gradient is just that, and you can also apply several of them to
"vignette" several elements at once. Use it to highlight two subjects and
darken the rest of the photo for instance.
Smart Previews, as I mentioned, let you generate a special kind of preview
(at import or manually). In LR you have always been able to edit metadata
and view previews of your photos even when the hard drive containing those
photos is offline or disconnected. Smart Previews extend this to actual
image editing.
The announcement says that these edits are then applied to the big photos
when you reconnect the drive, but this is only partly true. LightRoom never
actually edits the files you keep in it – the app instead stores the edits
you apply to an image as an XML (text) file, and generates previews and
exports based on these edits. The Smart Previews are just previews that can
show edits, and in theory you’ll only need to connect the drive to import,
export and delete files.
Photo books and slideshows we can skip. There’s another new feature not
mentioned in that list which is more interesting: you can now change the
shape of the clone tool, making it easier to erase non-circular objects. I
haven’t tried this one out yet.
The beta is just that: a beta app. As such it can’t import your existing LR
library. Nor can you export LR5 libraries back to previous versions, so
make sure that you import any important images into both versions for now.
The final version of LR5 *will* upgrade your beta test library to the full
version, though, so any awesome edits you make in the beta won’t be lost."
--
Paul Braun
Music Junkie
"Music washes from the soul the dust of everyday life." -- Harlan Howard
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