Aspen hillside, Tioyable NF, CA, USA (processed with Lightroom 5)

In April Adobe released the beta version of Lightroom 5, and the full shipping version came out in June. While the jump from Lightroom 4 to 5 wasn’t as big as some previous upgrades, there were some significant improvements, notably the Advanced Healing Brush and the Visualize Spots options for the Spot Removal Tool.

I shared my thoughts about all the changes in the post Lightroom 5 Beta from April. Since then I’ve used the Advanced Healing Brush a lot, and have actually found it to be even more helpful than I initially thought. It does take some practice to get the most out of this tool, but now I do almost all of my retouching in Lightroom, and rarely use Photoshop. This allows me to keep a completely non-destructive workflow, and means that I’ll never have to do the retouching for any of these images again (as I might if I used Photoshop for retouching and ever had to go back and make a change to the Raw file). Very nice.

At the end of July I launched my latest ebook and video package, Landscapes in Lightroom 5: The Essential Step-by-Step Guide, and it’s been very well received. To all of you who purchased this, thank you very much!

And along with the launch I released a free bonus video about using the arrow keys in Lightroom – a little time-saving tip that I use all the time.

Of course shortly after Adobe released the Lightroom 5 Beta they announced that Photoshop would only be available through a subscription to their Creative Cloud, which caused a lot of angst and controversy. But I’ll talk about that in my next post, and for now just celebrate the wonderful new tools in Lightroom 5!

— Michael Frye

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Michael Frye is a professional photographer specializing in landscapes and nature. He is the author or principal photographer of The Photographer’s Guide to Yosemite, Yosemite Meditations, Yosemite Meditations for Women, and Digital Landscape Photography: In the Footsteps of Ansel Adams and the Great Masters. He has also written three eBooks: Light & Land: Landscapes in the Digital Darkroom, Exposure for Outdoor Photography, and Landscapes in Lightroom 5: The Essential Step-by-Step Guide. Michael written numerous magazine articles on the art and technique of photography, and his images have been published in over thirty countries around the world. Michael has lived either in or near Yosemite National Park since 1983, currently residing just outside the park in Mariposa, California.