Adobe Lightroom

If you’re looking for an all-in-one Photo management and editing package that spans the territory of Lightroom and Photoshop but is integrated and easy to use, Cyberlink’s PhotoDirector is a powerful and reasonably priced option. It competes more or less head-to-head with Adobe’s Photoshop Elements ($80 discounted), so which one you wind up with will depend on the specific features you need and which interface you prefer. If you have the time, I recommend trying them both out.

The 9th Edition of PhotoDirector is now out ($99 for Cyberlink Photo Director 9 Ultra), with some impressive new features. It has support for 360-degree video editing (which is nearly impossible to do without application support), can create some of the now-popular output formats like timelapse, motion stills, and animations, and has content-aware move. It’s also picked up a Dehaze tool, a feature I’ve found very useful in Photoshop and OpticsPro both.

Until now, HDR capture on smartphones has been an under-the-covers merging of several frames in a fairly simple way by the phone itself. Now, Lightroom Mobile offers pro-grade HDR for supported phones. The app’s camera mode will analyze the scene, decide on the needed bracketing, capture the images in RAW mode, and then combine and tonemap them into a 32-bit floating-point DNG RAW file – allowing full HDR editing. This is pretty amazing when you consider that typically a similar workflow involves bracketing on a high-end camera, and the use of specialized software applications to do the merge and tone mapping. It works on the Apple iPhone 6s and later, Samsung Galaxy 7 and 7 edge, and Google’s Pixel family of phones. For users of other phones, there are still some goodies packed into the new version of Lightroom mobile:

For photographers looking for an alternative to Photoshop, that want all the power it provides and aren’t satisfied with the more limited processing capabilities of Adobe Lightroom or DxO OpticsPro, there haven’t been too many alternatives. The best options to date have been Adobe Photoshop Elements, Gimp, or perhaps Cyberlink’s PhotoDirector. Now though, Affinity has dramatically improved the capabilities of its Photo product and has also made it available on both Mac and Windows. For the value price of $40, you can have a product that does almost all of what Photoshop does, and many things it doesn’t. I’ve taken it for a spin and enjoyed using it. You can read my full review of Affinity Photo on Extremetech.com.

Without question, Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Premiere Pro are two of the most feature-packed applications for editing images and videos. However, they are also two of the most complex. Initially little more than toys, the “Elements” versions of each of them have improved steadily. Now in their 15th version, they provide more than enough capability for most photographers and videographers who don’t already know how to use, and are willing to pay for, their Pro siblings. You can read my full hands-on review of the new features in version 15, but in short, since about version 13, Elements has packed plenty of punch for most editing tasks, and 15 ups the ante with some cool new quick edits and some potentially-interesting AI-assisted object recognition. With this latest update Adobe's Photoshop and Premiere Elements have become the best way to get all the editing tools you're likely to need, in a package you can learn to use right out of the box. As always, the products are competitively priced, with Photoshop Elements 15 priced at $70 (discounted), and Premiere Elements 15 also priced at $90 (discounted). Purchasing both in a bundle saves you some money as you can get both for $120 (discounted).

Unless you have a monster computer, editing high-resolution images (or photos with lots of edits) can be slow and tiresome, whatever tool you are using. Fortunately, Adobe has just provided a simple fix for Lightroom users – editing the Smart Preview of an image instead of the full-resolution version. This was already what happened in Lightroom Mobile, or when you didn’t have the original image, but now you can easily enable the feature for all of your editing.

Adobe continues to deliver on its promise of steady updates for photographers subscribing to its Creative Cloud Photography plan. This week, Adobe updated the desktop versions of Lightroom and Photoshop with lots of bug fixes (especially to Lightroom), new camera and lens support (including for the new Sony a6300), and (finally) an updated UI for Adobe Camera Raw. Lightroom for the web has also been enhanced with intelligent object-recognition-based indexing for more powerful search, like this one for trees in my online collections…

In some exciting news for any image enthusiast owning a recent-vintage Android phone, Adobe has released a major upgrade to Lightroom Mobile for Android. It includes a slick in-app Camera, support for processing Raw images (assuming your phone supports Raw), some new filters, targeted adjustments, and a few other slick new features. I’ve written about my initial experiences with it, and more detail on its feature set in an article published on Extremetech.com. You can snag the free update from the Google Play Store.

Lightroom CC and Lightroom 6 users should see the update automatically when they do an Update check. Adobe has fixed a slew of bugs that it introduced in LR6.2, as well as adding support for about a half-dozen new cameras, and several dozen lenses (including the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus). The pre-LR6.2 Import experience has also been restored, as the updated version wasn’t exactly a hit. As usual, the update is free to those with a current license or subscription.