I finally updated to Lightroom 5, even though I didn’t really deem it worthy for the longest time. Who knows if there will be a Lightroom 6, or if it will maybe be called Lightroom CC, and available as a subscription only… for now, I like my perpetual licenses. :)
Anyway, here’s an old photo from 2010. While cleaning up my archives I revisited it, and Lightroom 5 finally allowed me to make an edit that is worth showing. More on that below the photo.
Puffy clouds and pastures at Winklmoosalm, Bavaria, Germany; June 2010.
Prints available in my store.
This is the scenic vista from the upper station of the Dürrnbachhorn cable car near Winklmoosalm in Bavaria, Germany. From here, it’s a short but steep uphill hike through low-growing, shrubby pine trees (“Latschenkiefern”) to the summit cross of Dürrnbachhorn.
I do have to say that Lightroom 5 has two features that I somewhat underestimated:
The first one is the advanced healing brush. It allowed me to remove a pole of the cable car on the very left. That’s something that I would have done in Photoshop in the past (Photoshop’s patch and heal and fill tools are among the few features that I can handle). It’s nice to be able to perform these simple fixes in Lightroom now, without the need to create a huge TIFF file.
The second, and more important one, is the refined color noise reduction feature, and most of all the “Color Smoothness” setting. I can’t stress enough just how well this works for strong black & white edits. The photo above doesn’t look like that, but I reduced the blue luminance quite a bit to make the clouds stand out more*. That always led to ugly and patchy rendition of the sky in the past, an in previous versions of Lightroom, it was simply not possible to get a smooth and clean looking rendition of more heavily manipulated color channels.
Lightroom 5 and the Color Smoothness setting opens new possibilities for black & white edits. My black & white Algodones Dunes images (where in a lot of images, the yellow and orange channels have been quite dramatically darkened in the black & white mixer, creating something like a blue filter effect as a starting point) wouldn’t have been possible without this.
*) at 12mm focal length and directly against the sun, a polarizer is completely useless – not that there would be one that could be used with Sigma’s insane 12-24mm full frame wide angle zoom lens anyway.