Lightroom 5 released

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 5 Develop module

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 5 has been officially released. In my experience it’s as bit more responsive than Lightroom 4. Want to learn more about it? Start here:

Announcement on the Lightroom blog at adobe.com

Hot Issues on the Lightroom blog

Adobe list of learning resources at adobe.com

Before you order an upgrade, remember to check all of your professional memberships and educational associations to see if discounts on Adobe software are part of your membership. In particular, if you have an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription, the upgrade is included with your subscription and available immediately; use the Creative Cloud desktop application to download it. By itself, Lightroom 5 is a $79 upgrade.

Mac App Store upgrade: If you look for Lightroom 5 at the Mac App Store, it isn’t there. Adobe has a tech note providing information about how to upgrade Lightroom 4 from the Mac App Store to Lightroom 5. It says “If you purchased Lightroom 4 from the Mac App Store and want to upgrade to Lightroom 5, purchase the upgrade from Adobe or another vendor.” The Lightroom 5 upgrade installer will recognize your Mac App Store license and upgrade it.

Adobe doesn’t say why Lightroom 5 is not available on the Mac App Store. It could be because the Mac App Store does not provide a paid upgrade path. The Mac App Store allows apps to be sold for only one price with free updates; upgrade discounts and free trials are not allowed by Apple. It’s also possible that Lightroom 5 has not yet been coded for the special requirements of the Mac App Store, but Adobe has not said whether Lightroom will return to the Mac App Store. Buying from the App Store has the advantage of easy installation and use on up to 5 Mac computers, but updates tend to take a little longer to appear than from Adobe because of the App Store approval process.

Potential gotchas

List of known problems. Review both the Known Issues listed at the end of the Lightroom blog post linked above, and also the Hot Issues blog post linked above.

If you post a lot of small photos to web sites, blogs, social media, or email, and if you shoot a lot of images at high ISO speed settings, you may want to delay upgrading to Lightroom 5 because one of the known issues is this: “Images exported at less than 1/3 of their original size may not retain Output Sharpening and Noise Reduction settings.”  It may not be a problem for you if you don’t apply output sharpening or noise reduction to most of your images, or if you upload/share full-size images. I ran into this issue and had to work around it by first exporting images from Lightroom 5 at full size so that noise reduction would be applied, and then I imported those into Lightroom 4 so that output sharpening would be applied when I exported them to the final small JPEG files.

Before you convert a catalog from an earlier version of Lightroom, optimize it and back it up! This can help prevent problems during conversion. To optimize, choose File > Optimize Catalog. When backing up, if you don’t want to turn on automatic backups, in the Catalog Settings dialog box you can select When Lightroom Next Exits and it will back it up just that one time, while also checking the catalog for integrity.

If you open raw files from Lightroom 5 into Photoshop, keep in mind that the raw processing engine inside Lightroom 5 is now ahead of the one in Camera Raw 7, which comes with Photoshop CS6. To successfully preserve the raw settings from Lightroom 5 in Photoshop CS6 or later, you’ll need Camera Raw 8 or later. You can now download Adobe Camera Raw 8.1 now by choosing Help > Updates in Photoshop CS6, from the Creative Cloud desktop application if you’re an Adobe Creative Cloud subscriber, or by direct download (choose Camera Raw from the Find Product Updates pop-up menu).

Mac version requires OS X 10.7 or later. With Lightroom 5, the system requirements have moved up so that your Mac must be running OS X 10.7 (Lion) or later before you  are allowed to install it. Many users have been using Lightroom 4 on a workstation running 10.6.8 Snow Leopard because Snow Leopard is a familiar, stable release, and when Lion first came out there were bugs in areas such as printing that caused many creatives to stay with Snow Leopard. Well, it’s two years later and time to let go of that anxiety. While some dislike the iOS-like additions to Lion and Mountain Lion, I have found that much of that can be switched off and I’m comfortable with the Mountain Lion experience on my MacBook Pro.

If you are a Creative Cloud subscriber and Lightroom 5 does not appear in the Creative Cloud desktop application as available for installation, one reason may be that the Mac does not meet the Lightroom 5 system requirements. It actually took me a few minutes to figure this out after wondering why Lightroom 5 wasn’t listed on one of my Macs; I finally realized that Mac runs Snow Leopard and needs to be upgraded.

(To put this in context, Lightroom’s direct competitor Apple Aperture dropped Snow Leopard support a year ago when Aperture 3.3 was released in June 2012. Snow Leopard users were supported for a significantly longer time by Adobe than by Apple itself.)

Choosing a Website For Your Photos—CreativePro.com article

Choosing a Website For Your Photos on CreativePro.com

Your portfolio should not just be about publishing and sharing, but should also support the goals of your creative career. In my latest article for CreativePro.com, I help you sort through the numerous options for creating a home for your photography online, including free social media sites, template-based fine art portfolio sites, and professional sales-oriented sites.

Click the link below to read the article at CreativePro.com:
Choosing a Website for Your Photos

How to Digitize a Film Archive with Adobe Lightroom or Camera Raw — CreativePro.com article

How to Digitize a Film Archive with Adobe Lightroom or Camera Raw on CreativePro.com

Digitizing an archive of film images can be a time-consuming process. In my latest article for CreativePro.com, I tell you how to use Adobe Photoshop Lightroom (or Adobe Camera Raw with Adobe Bridge) to accelerate importing, editing, and organizing incoming film scans. You’ll get through hundreds of scans much faster and more efficiently than editing each image individually in Photoshop.

Click the link below to read the article at CreativePro.com:
How to Digitize a Film Archive with Adobe Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw

Updates: Adobe Camera Raw 7.4 and Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4.4

Lightroom 4 icon

Adobe has released Camera Raw 7.4 and Lightroom 4.4 with the same raw processing updates for both, and with a corresponding DNG Converter 7.4 update. All are free updates for current licenses of the software. The updates include the usual bug fixes and add support for new cameras (including the Canon EOS 1D C, Canon Digital Rebel SL1 and T5i, and Nikon D7100), improved processing for Fujifilm cameras with the X-Trans sensor, new lens correction profiles, and more details that you can read about on these Adobe posts:

If you have versions of Photoshop and Lightroom that are too old for these updates, you can use the latest DNG Converter, which is free, to convert raw files from new cameras into the DNG format that older software can read.

And if you’ve been using the Release Candidate (RC) versions that were released by Adobe Labs earlier this year for public testing, you should install these final versions because the customer feedback from the RC versions contributed to even more changes and fixes in the final versions. Also, the RC version will eventually expire.

How to update

There are lots of ways to get these new versions:

If you subscribe to Adobe Creative Cloud, start the Adobe Application Manager and the updates will be listed.

To update Photoshop and Camera Raw directly, start Photoshop and choose Help > Updates.

To update Lightroom, start Lightroom and choose Help > Check for Updates. If you bought Lightroom through the Mac App Store, the update may take a longer to become available there because it has to wait for Apple approval.

or:

To download the updates for a manual installation, go to:

http://www.adobe.com/downloads/updates/

(Although Camera Raw hadn’t shown up yet when I posted this article.)

Should PC sales figures include tablets?

iPad image courtesy Apple Inc.

Reports from analysts such as Canalys raised a few eyebrows by saying that Apple reached over 20% share of the PC market for the first time in Q4 of 2012…if you count tablets. Canalys claims that one in six PCs shipped that quarter was an iPad, and that tablets as a group made up one-third of PC shipments in that quarter. In the same quarter, non-tablet PC shipments declined, continuing a long trend.

Many online commenters question the idea that tablets should be included in PC sales numbers. Unsurprisingly, some of the most vocal opposition is from the “specs, desktop, and keyboard” geek crowd who insist that tablets can’t do the job that a “real PC” can, and therefore you can’t count a tablet as a PC. That perspective may be technically sound, but may not be what matters to the market. And thinking of this as merely a specs comparison makes the questionable assumption that tablet sales and PC sales are functionally separate categories. For example, is Microsoft Surface Pro with full Windows 8 a tablet or a PC?

To get a better answer, think about this question from the point of view of a PC manufacturer (or as they say, “follow the money”). If you have a customer who buys a PC from you on a regular basis, but this year they bought somebody else’s tablet, your customer realized that many or all of their most frequent computer needs can be fulfilled with a tablet. That’s quite plausible given that so many of today’s applications are web-based and rarely require the full horsepower of a multi-core PC.

Tablets cut into PC sales to some extent as PC replacements, and to an even larger extent they can delay a customer’s PC upgrade cycle. That means tablets do not have to be technically equal to a PC in order to have a financial effect on PC manufacturers. Tablets affect PC sales as they are.

The bottom line, if you’re a PC manufacturer, is this: If your customer didn’t buy your PC because they bought somebody else’s tablet instead, then a tablet sale has to count as a PC sale…because a tablet cost you a sale.