The next version of Lightroom is coming soon. Adobe announced today that it was releasing a free beta of Lightroom 5, which will be free to use until June 30. Available to download from Adobe’s site, all you need is an Adobe account and you are good to go.
From Adobe’s announcement:
With this release, our goal was to add some highly-desired features that allow photographers to quickly process and enhance their images. We’ve added more robust healing options, the ability to create off-center vignettes, and a one-click auto perspective correction tool. We’ve also added the ability to edit photos when not connected to your original images. Each of these improvements is a result of feedback provided by the Lightroom community. Thank you.
Its closest competitor is probably Aperture, so it will be interesting to see if Lightroom 5 can extend its reach on OS X and steal some users away from Apple’s photo editing software.
Lightroom 5 should ship later this year, with new features including Advanced Healing Brush (an enhancement to the Spot Removal Tool) and Smart Preview (a smaller version of the image which you can edit offline).
