Adobe Lightroom 5 review – Still the best photo organiser

Adobe Lightroom has long been one of our favourite photo managers, thanks to its high quality image processing, sophisticated, non-destructive colour correction, powerful noise reduction and automatic correction for a range of lens defects. Its raw format support is extremely comprehensive, too, with regular updates for new cameras. Its catalogue management is efficient and responsive, with filtering by metadata and sophisticated map plotting.

Adobe knows not to disrupt a winning formula, so version 5 comes with a selection of new and enhanced tools but no significant changes to the interface or workflow. It has been out over a year now, as Adobe doesn’t feel a need for annual updates to this particular package.

We have updated this review to look at Lightroom Mobile, which lets you edit and share your photos from your iPad, iPhone or Android device. It’s available to anyone who has a Creative Cloud plan that includes Lightroom, such as the entry-level Photography plan, which costs £8.57 a month or £102 per year.

The main thing that’s changed in that time is that Adobe has created a Photography Creative Cloud bundle which includes the latest version of Lightroom, along with the mighty Photoshop CC, all for a price of £7.49 a month. It’s a good bundle for those who are keen to manipulate their images significantly, but for simple touch-ups, photo management and colour correction, you can do a surprising amount with Lightroom alone for a one-off cost of around £100.

New tools

Lightroom 4’s Spot Removal Tool for removing blemishes was previously limited to making circular patch jobs. It’s now known as the Advanced Healing Brush in version 5 and it can be applied in brush strokes to eliminate larger, irregular-shaped objects. It’s easy and quick to use, with the software automatically selecting a source area from which to clone, although this can be adjusted simply by dragging. A Heal mode helps to colour-match the cloned material with its new surroundings, but there’s no control over how much the edges are feathered. We sometimes found that the colour of the unwanted object leaked through slightly. With no way to amend existing brush strokes, the only solution was to undo and have another go. Layer-based photo editors such as Photoshop Elements are still the best option for major retouching jobs, but even so Lightroom 5’s Advanced Healing Brush is able to tackle trickier jobs than Lightroom 4’s Spot Removal Tool.

^ The Advanced Healing Brush makes it easier to remove large, complex-shaped objects from photos ^ Some images require a few brush strokes with the Advanced Healing Brush for convincing results, but it’s still pretty quick

The Radial Filter is another refinement of an existing feature. Colour correction could already be applied to limited areas of an image using either the Adjustment Brush or the linear Graduated Filter. The Radial Filter does the same but using circular or elliptical shapes. There’s a long list of processes that can be applied, including white balance, various brightness and contrast controls, saturation, sharpness, noise reduction and colour filters. A Feather control adjusts how hard the edge of the affected area is, and an Invert Mask option selects whether the inside or the outside of the ellipse is affected. The Sharpness control can be reduced to –100 to give a blur effect.

^ The Radial Filter is just the thing for atmospheric vignette and selective focus effects ^ The Radial Filter can also be handy for subtle colour correction tweaks to areas of a photo

The Radial Filter may not be much of a technical innovation but it quickly proved its worth. Not just for vignette and edge blur effects, but also for local colour correction where we required a very gentle transition from affected to non-affected parts of an image. Being able to switch back and forth between adjusting the area and effect settings was more intuitive than adding and removing brush strokes with the Adjustment Brush.

The Upright Tool skews photos so straight lines are parallel with the edges of the photo. It’s based on automatic analysis, and there are options to straighten horizontal, vertical or both axes; an Auto mode makes the decision for you. It’s useful for getting the horizon level, but only if it’s extremely straight. It’s handy for seascapes, perhaps. It proved to be more effective for aligning buildings, interior walls and floors and various other manmade structures, often producing a stronger composition. The automatic analysis comes at the expense of precise control, but the software rarely failed to produce meaningful results, and its speed was a real asset.

^ The Upright Tool automatically aligns shapes with the edges of the photo, giving extra punch to compositions ^ The Upright Tool is also useful for reducing the perspective in buildings ^ The Upright Tool can produce some dramatic changes, given the right source material

Smart previews

The new Smart Previews feature is designed for people who don’t have room for their entire photo collection on their laptop’s hard disk or SSD. Smart Preview files are in Adobe’s Digital Negative (DNG) format, and weigh in at around 4 megapixels and 1MB each. They allow photos to be viewed and even edited when the original files aren’t available such as when they’re on external storage that isn’t currently connected.

It’s a clever idea that’s generally well implemented. The DNGs are quick to create as required, and there’s an option to discard unwanted ones, although only if you can remember which folders you generated them for. We couldn’t find a way to show all files that have Smart Previews associated with them. Being able to edit on the move is welcome, and the DNG format preserves the full dynamic range of cameras’ raw files. It’s perfect for performing colour correction, but we’re surprised to find that sharpness and noise reduction settings can be edited too. These settings looked very different when applied to the 4-megapixel DNGs compared to the much higher-resolution originals. We’d love the Smart Previews function even more if it allowed us to edit the same Lightroom catalogue on both a laptop and a desktop PC, but sadly, that’s not possible.

Lightroom Mobile

One of the big new features that Adobe has introduced since it launched Lightroom 5 is Lightroom Mobile, which lets you organise and edit your photos from your iPad, iPhone or Android device. Any changes you make your mobile device are synchronised back to your computer through the cloud. The service isn’t available with the standard off-the-shelf Lightroom, and only with Creative Cloud plans.

To get started you first have to sign Lightroom desktop into Lightroom Mobile, and then choose which Collections you want to sync with the service. There’s no cloud storage limit, although Adobe says that you’ll fit a maximum of 60,000 photos on a 128GB iPad. You don’t get a copy of the full photo, either, with Adobe creating a smaller, mobile-friendly version of the photo. As such, the Lightroom Mobile is more of a tool for working with your latest photos than one for uploading and managing your entire collection.

Once your computer has uploaded all of the photos to the cloud, you can fire up the mobile app, which will automatically download the photos. Once they’re on your tablet or phone, you can edit them, with the changes synchronising back through the cloud to the original photo. Annoyingly, while you can browse your photos if your tablet’s offline, you can’t make any edits unless it’s online. Presumably this is because the software has to download the latest version and edits to you device, but it’s still a little frustrating.

Lightroom Mobile is exceptionally easy to use, with its neat touchscreen interface and sliders letting you edit most aspects of your photo. Multi-touch and gesture support really help here, making the software lightning quick: for example, you can double-tap a slider to reset it to default, a three-fingered press on the screen shows you before and after images, and you can swipe up or down to Flag or Reject an image.

You don’t get access to the full range of tools that the Desktop application provides. For example, you don’t get the noise reduction slider (there’s only a filter with default presets), and you don’t get access to lens profiles either. That doesn’t mean that the software’s useless, as you get pretty much the full spectrum of exposure and colour controls. Using these with the crop tool, it means that you can at least get your images looking the way you want. Of course, all changes are non-destructive so you can undo or re-do edits on your desktop at a later date.

You may be asking why you’d bother with this software, particularly as it’s a cut-down version of the desktop edition. However, if you’ve just got back from a shoot and have tons of photos to go through, sitting down with your iPad and marking the photos you want to keep and those you want to reject, while doing some initial cropping and colour work, is a refined and neat way of doing things.

Using Lightroom Mobile also gives you a second advantage: you can share your collections online, giving people a link to a web-based collection for them to view. It makes Lightroom Mobile a quick and simple way to share your latest photos. We can’t pretend that this software is a must-have, but for Creative Cloud subscribers, it’s a nice additional touch, and Lightroom’s controls are perfectly suited to a touchscreen interface.

Slideshows

The Slideshow module can now create slideshows that include videos or a mixture of videos and photos, with exports in MP4 format at resolutions up to 1,920×1,080 progressive. Along with the Library module’s ability to truncate video clips and perform basic colour correction, Lightroom can tackle basic video-editing tasks, just about.

Book design was introduced in version 4, and gave polished results but provided surprisingly little scope to customise the page templates. Text design is a little more flexible in this update but it still feels clumsy. Captions often collide with other photos on the same page, and auditioning fonts is slow.

The Book module remains a slightly weak area, but it’s also arguably the least important for most people. We have a few other niggles, such as that there’s no web space provided for hosting online galleries, and that filtering the catalogue by metadata is limited to four criteria at a time. Handling of videos remains basic, but the fact that they’re supported at all is welcome for photographers who occasionally dabble with video.

We also experienced a bug that corrupted the undo history for photos imported into our catalogue prior to version 3. It’s a niche issue but it’s still disconcerting, as Lightroom has previously been extremely reliable for maintaining the integrity of the catalogue through each update. This problem is already published on Adobe’s Known Issues list and we look forward to a quick remedy.

CONCLUSION

Nearly everything else about Lightroom 5 is seriously impressive. Catalogue management remains fast and elegant. Image processing was already the best around, and now it’s better than ever. The mapping and printing functions are spot on, too. Some people will want to use it in conjunction with a fully fledged editor such as Photoshop Elements, but there’s increasingly little need.