It’s official – Lightroom 5 has just been released. Here’s the download link you’ll need. As with previous versions, it is available as a perpetual license from Adobe and other resellers (full price $149, upgrade $79), as well as being included in the Creative Cloud.
So what’s new?
Most of the new features were in the 5.0 beta, so I won’t repeat the full list again. If you haven’t tried the beta, here’s my 5.0 beta blog post with a detailed list of the changes. There have been around 400 bug fixes, including a fix for Upright which wasn’t straightening easy horizons. Feathering on the Radial Filter has been doubled, at the request of beta testers. There’s also a new Behance plug-in, and the Revel plug-in is now being maintained by the Revel team.
Performance isn’t specifically mentioned in the release notes, but the feedback from the forums has been excellent, with many users comparing the Develop interactive speed to Lightroom 3.
Camera raw file support has been added for a few more cameras: (cameras in italic were added in the 4.3 release candidate)
- Hasselblad H5D-60
- Olympus PEN E-P5 & E-PL6
- Phase One IQ260*
- Ricoh GR
- Panasonic LUMIX DMC-G6 & DMC-LF1
- Various new lenses too
ACR 8.1 is also now available for CS6, and although it doesn’t have a UI for the new features, it does render them correctly when you use Edit in Photoshop.
Make sure you read the Known Issues in the release notes, as there are a few this time, including Canon tethering issues on Windows 8, a glitch with PV2003 photos in the Develop module, and a possible bug when selecting photos in the Publish Services view (which is proving tough to reproduce, and may have been around for years).
When you come to upgrade your catalog, Lightroom will check the original files to add additional information to the catalog – Image Bit Depth (i.e. 8-bit, 16-bit, 32-bit), Color Mode (i.e. RGB, Greyscale, CMYK, etc.) and Color Profile (i.e. sRGB, Adobe RGB, etc.) – and that can take a long time if you have a large catalog or your photos are on slower storage (i.e. NAS). If you’re not interested in that data, taking the photos offline first will speed up the catalog upgrade, but it’s not easy to add that data later. Laura Shoe has an excellent video on upgrading, if it’s your first time.
Finally, a quick update on my Lightroom 5 book. I’m just adding the finishing touches, so the PDF format should be available in the next few days, with the other formats following shortly thereafter. And yes, if you own an earlier version, there will be an upgrade discount available, which I’ll email to you shortly after release. More updates soon!
alison says
I have a problem! I want to use the smart previews catalog in another location, and be able to download/email low res images from it. But when I close my LR catalog (with smart previews created) there is no smart previews catalog in the folder where the regular catalog is. That means the thumbnails are grey… argh. What am I doing wrong?
THANKS
alison
Victoria Bampton says
Have you got normal previews rendered for those files too? What IS in the folder where the regular catalog is?
Don McGuiney says
I’m very frustrated and your site is the only I can find to record anything. Last June I bought Ver 4 and today tried to update to Ver 5. I had no idea I wouldn’t be allowed to do so but would have to pay for Ver 5. I’m not a professional in photography and don’t get much time to spend on LR. Won’t be doing anymore Adobe products for sure.
Victoria Bampton says
Hi Don, sorry to hear of your frustration. Almost all software companies charge for full version upgrades, and offer a discounted upgrade price, so Adobe aren’t unusual in that. What made you think you wouldn’t need to pay for it?
Jean Paulo says
HI there, I’m struggling with L5 on developing module specially when using adjustment brushes and spot removal tool. After a few strokes, its starts to slow down. I did not experience this problem on L4. Any idea why? thanks for the help.
Victoria Bampton says
There have been a few reports Jean Paulo, but without an obvious cause. Making sure your graphics card and Wacom drivers are up to date is always a good first port of call, and hopefully there will be an RC available soon.
Jean Paulo says
HI there, I’m struggling with L5 on developing module specially when using adjustment brushes and spot removal tool. After a few strokes, its starts to slow down. I did not experience this problem on L4. Any idea why? thanks for the help.
Arthur Argote says
Victoria, I wonder if you have seen this bug in LR: When I copy develop settings from one photo to another, the White balance doesn’t appear to be updated with the changes. Thanks!
Victoria Bampton says
Hi Arthur. Would I be right in thinking your white balance is set to ‘as shot’? What’s happening is it’s syncing the ‘as shot’ status rather than the numeric values. If you tweak one of the values slightly, or select Custom from the pop-up, it’ll work the way you’re expecting.
Lorenzo Photography says
Glad I moved to LR5. Played with the beta but there were too many niggles and it seems Adobe have addressed most of them. Not finding the Auto correct in lens correction terribly useful though. Still finding manual preferable or even exporting to PS6 for a better result.
Victoria Bampton says
Yeah, I think they’ve still got some finetuning to do to Upright yet, but it’ll improve over time.
LightroomLove says
Victoria, curious to know; when a new version of Lightroom is pushed out, how do you personally handle the transition? Do you start upgrading your back collection of catalogs, or just start rolling it out on all future work? I seem to struggle with the balancing act!
Victoria Bampton says
Excellent question LightroomLove. It’s yet another of the reasons to stick to using only one or two catalogs, rather than starting a new catalog for each job. If I had to use separate catalogs for some reason, I’d just upgrade them as I needed to open then.
Personally, I’m running beta versions most of the year, so I tend to use throwaway catalogs for testing, and just upgrade my main catalog about 3 months before release. I’m pretty careful about keeping lots of backups though, as I’ve had to roll back to earlier versions on many an occasion!
LightroomLove says
Got it – so it sounds like that a combination of staying up to date and utilizing good backups is pivotal to your workflow. Also interested to hear that you are firmly planted in the one (or two) catalogs philosophy. Always enjoy speaking to other Lightroom Lovers. 🙂
Grace says
Does Lightroom 5 and Lightroom 4.4 tether with a Nikon D3000 Camera?
Victoria Bampton says
No, it doesn’t Grace, sorry. Here’s the tethering list: http://www.lrq.me/tethersupport
Nancy J says
Hi Have restored the Library phew…rebooted 3 times before the Library was an available option.
Victoria Bampton says
How very odd Nancy! Not a clue what was going on there!!!
Nancy J says
I am having consistent recurring issues with Lightroom 5. I am on Mac Mountain Lion. Tonight as I am working thru a large photo shoot, the Library tab has disappeared. I have rebooted Lightroom and rebooted my computer. This is on top of the fact that Lightroom has frozen and required a reboot 4 times in the last day. I have 16mb of ram and 1 tb hard drive free with several backup drives. Any one else with issues? Any ideas? TX
Paul Johnson says
I always leave it a bit before update, I’ve been with LR from the start and I’m sure the improvements will make the investment worthwhile but I’m a bit skint right now so will have to wait,
Victoria Bampton says
Sounds like a sensible plan Paul. It’ll be a good upgrade when the budget does allow for it.
Adrian says
Simples! When you know how 🙂
Adrian says
Simples! When you know how 🙂
York Place Studios says
Going to take the plunge to LR5 today I think, got stuck on LR3 as I heard so many bad things about it! Really useful blog post thanks so much for sharing 🙂
Frank Blau says
What’s with the momentary blur as you change settings? That was never there before. Grr.
Victoria Bampton says
Which version did you upgrade from? The pixel doubling was introduced in a 4.x build for performance reasons.
Frank Blau says
Upgraded from 4.4 x64
Victoria Bampton says
That’s odd, I thought they decided to stick with the 4.x preview rendering in the end. It might be worth reporting on the bug report forum if you can’t repeat it on 4.4.
Rob Davis says
I’ve just upgraded from 4.4 to 5.3 and immediately noticed this ‘pixel doubling’. It wasn’t there in 4.4 and if it was it was so subtle I didn’t notice it. Extremely irritating and I find it much more difficult to make accurate changes in Lightroom 5. I wish I’d not bothered with the upgrade.
Victoria Bampton says
I’m hearing a few reports Rob, although I can’t reproduce it myself. It would be worth reporting it at the bug report forum here: http://clkuk.tradedoubler.com/click?p(265883)a(2791170)g(22913796)url(http://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family)
Rob Davis says
Thanks Victoria. I’ll do that.
Rob Davis says
I’m encountering bugs everywhere. The latest annoyance is the presets aren’t getting applied to the preview window in the Navigator when I roll over them with the mouse. I’ve only been using Lr 5 for a couple of hours in total!
Victoria Bampton says
If you can figure out how to get it into that state, it’s more likely to get fixed. Like the other one, I’ve heard a few reports, but never been able to reproduce it.
Rob Davis says
Good point. I’ll try and keep an eye on what’s triggering it.
Rob Davis says
Well I haven’t figured out why it happens. What I have found is this bug was reported six months ago and Adobe still haven’t fixed it. Fortunately I’ve started using other Raw processing applications recently as I find them superior to Lightroom in terms of final image quality. But Lr is extremely useful for it’s DAM capabilities and local editing. I couldn’t live without the Gradient filter! I hope things improve in Lr 5 and these bugs get ironed out but I can see I’ll have to go back to Lr 4.4 to avoid all these niggles.
Victoria Bampton says
Do you have a link to the bug report Rob? If no one’s been able to reproduce it on demand, it’s nigh on impossible to fix.
Kuba Bo?anowski says
I’ve got exactly the same problem, upgrading to 5.0 from 4.4 x64 where this wasn’t an issue. I’ve started a thread about it here: http://clkuk.tradedoubler.com/click?p(265883)a(2791170)g(22913796)url(http://forums.adobe.com/thread/1269588)
ssphillips says
Thanks for the note about the catalog upgrade. Now the “Preparing new searchable data” description in the upgrade dialog makes sense. My catalog is massive (over 4 GB) and a significant portion of the files are on a NAS drive. It has been doing the upgrade for over 10 hours so far and it appears to be only about 60% done. It is still moving, but very slowly. Hopefully by morning it will be done.