Like most things these days, Lightroom 6 details have leaked ahead of any official announcement. French website Fnac.com has it listed for around 130 euros.
My thoughts on some of the new and notable features are:
Merge to HDR
Lightroom has a chance here to really eat the lunch of all of the other HDR software providers out there. Most of the software available for HDR work is less than intuitive and take us a ton of space on hard drives. If Lightroom approaches this like they have the rest of their develop module I could see this being a big draw for those photographers out there that are tired of bouncing images from program to program on their computer.
Panorama
Pretty much the same as above. I have a feeling you will be seeing many more HDR and Panorama images on the internet machine after Lightroom 6 is released.
Sophisticated Video Slideshows
Finally! I don’t know how many more of your crappy YouTube slide shows I can sit through… Just kidding. Again, I think this is a great addition. Anything that allows me to eliminate other software and edit things within one program is going to speed up the workflow and make life easier. I can see this really being utilized by Wedding Photographers.
Integration Of Online Sharing
The ability to directly upload an image to Facebook and Flickr with all of the details (groups, tags, etc.) would be great. We will have to wait and see how Adobe implemented this. The part about being able to read comments and details in Lightroom from Flickr sounds cool.
Performance Improvement
What’s the emoticon for jumping up and snapping my feet together in the air? Unless you’re working on a SD Drive the develop module in Lightroom is anything but speedy. Any speed improvements here deserves a round of applause.
Below is the complete list from the website…
Environment nondestructive
Unleash your creativity in a nondestructive editing environment that allows you to test your ideas freely. The originals remain intact and you can easily cancel your edits or save multiple versions of a cliché.
Advanced conversion feature black and white
Monitor closely the tonal qualities so essential to the black and white photos. Combine precisely the information of eight color layers in the grayscale conversion.
Development predefined settings
Save time by instantly applying the desired effect to your images.
Just save develop settings as a preset and apply them to other photos in a click. If Lightroom includes dozens of presets, thousands more are offered by third parties.
Face Recognition
Quickly find pictures of loved ones, even without metadata tags. You select a face on the photo, Lightroom and search the person it belongs to all of your other shots. Sort and group your photos by faces.
Sophisticated Healing Brush
Get best pictures with one touch. Set the brush size and move it according to specific plots. Unwanted items and other imperfections, including irregular shapes son type, magically disappear.
Upright (Vertically)
Straighten skewed images with a single click. The Upright tool (Vertically) analyzes the image and detects horizontal or vertical lines inclined. It can even recover images without horizon.
Merge to HDR
Create realistic or surreal images from high-contrast scenes. By merging HDR, you can easily combine photos with different exposures into a single HDR image.
Fusion panoramas
Realize XXL ultra detailed panoramas. Photo merge technology lets you merge multiple images, including raw files, to create panoramas out of the ordinary.
Performance gains
Import and refine your photos in record time. Lightroom leverages compatible graphics process to get you better performance, especially when you edit your images in the Develop module.
Sophisticated video slideshows
Create stunning slideshows combining still images, movies and music, and supplement them with pan and zoom effects, for example.
Optimized web galleries
Present your work in the most elegant web galleries, more attractive and interactive. The new models of HTML5 compatible galleries are supported by many browsers and mobile devices work stations.
Integration of online sharing
Easily publish images on social networks and sites for such as Facebook and Flickr. On some sites, you can even view the online comments on your images directly from Lightroom Library.
Creating photo books
Create beautiful photo books. Lightroom includes a large number of user-friendly catalog templates that you can now customize. Load them then printing a few clicks.
[first read on PhotoRumors.com]
