Adobe Lightroom CC 201.6 and Lightroom 6.6 where released yesterday (8 June). CC customers will find a number of new features most useful of which is Guided Upright (more below). For non CC customers this version only includes some bug fixes along with new camera and lens support.

 

Guided Upright 

Adobe introduced the Upright tools in Lightroom 5 to help customers easily straighten images, fix horizons, and reduce or eliminate the keystone effect in buildings.  However these tools were auto only  and tended to work best when there are prominent vertical and horizontal lines in the photo. With Lightroom CC 2015.6 Adobe has included the ability to manually define the vertical and horizontal lines to be used for the Upright transform.

Use the following hints to get started.

1. Select an photo and click on the Develop Module.
2. Enable Lens Profile Corrections.  This step is important as Upright works better with Lens Profile Corrections activated.

Note that the Upright tab has been removed from the Lens Corrections panel thus simplifying it. The new Transform panel is for all users. However, only CC customers will se the Guided Upright button. 

3. Notice that there is a new ‘Transform’ Panel. Transform includes both Upright and the manual perspective correction sliders together in a convenient place.

The following photo is a typical example of where Guided Upright works particularly well.

4. Within Transform panel, click on the ‘Guided’ button. Next draw the vertical and horizontal lines directly on the image and Upright automatically transforms the image. The maximum number of guide lines is 4. However, Upright will transform the image once you draw at least 2 guides.

If needed, you can fine tune the results with the manual transform sliders, including the new X and Y transform sliders.  These can be used for  repositioning/moving the image within the canvas after applying the perspective corrections to choose which part of the (warped, non-rectangular) image to show within the rectangular canvas. It’s also possible to fine tune the guide lines by clicking and dragging on the guide handles.

Check out this great video by Julieanne Kost to learn more about Guided Upright!

Other Improvements

• Lightroom CC 2015.6 and 6.6 also benefits from improved louping performance in  Develop module by being smarter about anticipating which photos you’ll edit next. Basically, when you’re working in the Develop module Lightroom preloads two photos either side of the current photo. This means that when you move on, the next image will render much faster. (Update – due to performance issues resulting from over aggressive caching Adobe has released an update (2015.6.1) that improves performance on 4K and 5K displays).
• Prior to 2015.6 it was only possible to create a panorama merge when the originals were available (on-line), but now you can build a panorama if  smart previews are available. The downside being, a panorama created from smart previews will be smaller than one created from the images.

Syncing Photos with Adobe Cloud

I must admit that I’m not the greatest fan of Lightroom mobile/web. My main complaint being that syncing photos to the Adobe Cloud is all but impossible on low bandwidth internet connections. For example, prior to fibre broadband becoming available in my area the fastest upload speed I could achieve was in the order of 350kbs. Typically, it would take me an hour to upload 100 photos and another 10/15 minutes for them to become available on my iPad. The process was made even worse because there was no feedback on progress if a sync error occurred. Fortunately, I now have fibre broadband with upload speed in the order of 18mbs and download speed of just under 77mbs. Coincidently, Lightroom now includes (Lightroom CC only) an activity sync panel that provides visual feedback on sync progress. That said, why Adobe decided to include this panel within Lightroom Preferences is a head scratcher.

Disclosure: As an Adobe Community Professional I receive a free subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud.