If you need something with more oomph for managing your photos than iPhoto but don’t really care for Aperture, good news: Adobe has updated Photoshop Lightroom to version 4.3, not just fixing a ton of bugs, but adding Retina support for MacBook Pros and adding support for twenty new digital cameras.
Adobe has made available a new RC (release candidate) version of Lightroom, numbered v.4.3. On its own, this is clearly not worth an entire blog post, or even a tweet. But there’s one new feature that you Retina MacBook Pro owners might be interested in: HiDPI support.
No, it’s not Egon. HDR Express, the enthusiast-level high dynamic range Mac app from Unified Color Technologies, is now out in a new version with improved de-ghosting algorithms for images with moving subjects, among a handful of other interesting new features.
What if I told you there was a plugin for Lightroom which would mirror the latest edit of every photo in library in the cloud, and make it available in a neat, iPad optimized browser view right away?
You’d probably just call me a liar, skip to the next post and maybe take a sip of your coffee, muttering “That idiot Sorrel is doing it again. I’m writing to hi damn editor this time.”
Well, you’d be a fool. Instead, let that coffee cool a little and come take a look at Mosaic.
Remember those neat Lightroom presets which would add Instagram filters to your big grown-up photos? Now the author Casey Mac is back with versions for Photoshop (snore) and Aperture (yay!).
I love having my photos on my iPad, but I hate using iPhoto to get them there. To be honest, I just hate iPhoto, along with its more complicated and even more sluggish cousin, Aperture. I use Lightroom, and up until last week I was exporting photos from there into iPhoto just to sync them. Not only was this a headache, but it was a waste of space.
Now, you can tell iTunes to sync any folder of photos to the iPad, but with a little bit of effort things can be made much more elegant. By setting up Lightroom correctly, we can have any changes to our photos mirrored to the iPad at the touch of a button, and the whole process is near-automatic.
Apply Instagram filters to any photo
Speaking of Lightroom and iOS, what if you could take the beautifully shot RAW files from your SLR, bring them into Adobe’s super-powerful processing app and… apply Instagram filters? Now you can, thanks to a $5 set of presets from Casey Mac Photo.
If you own Lightroom and an iPad, buy this app now
Lightroom-using iPad owners, get ready for some good news: Photosmith 2 has just launched a few hours early, and is just as amazing an update as we hoped it would be.
Photosmith is a combination of iPad app and Lightroom plugin (Mac or PC) which will sync photos between the two machines, and let you edit metadata, add keywords and otherwise triage your photos on your iPad before sending them off to Lightroom for editing.
V2 adds batch tagging, two-way sync (for sending photos from your Mac to the iPad), smart groups, metadata presets and a lot more. A full review will follow, but our first impressions are below.
Adobe’s Photoshop Lightroom 4 can now be bought from the Mac App Store. The RAW photo editing app joins Adobe’s own Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements, and is Adobe’s first full-featured flagship application to make it into the store.
Lightroom 4 isn’t nearly as big of an update as versions 2 or 3, but that’s more of a sign of a mature product than anything else. There are a few all-new features, but the one thing that will really, really want to upgrade is the new Highlights and Shadows section. It really is good enough to justify this point-release upgrade all by itself.
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