Everyone is talking about the new lightroom 6 so I thought I would jump on the bandwagon. 

Lightroom (LR) comes in two versions, as a stand alone product and as part of Adobe’s CC subscription. Personally the CC model makes sense for the  way I work. I do a lot of retouching in Photoshop, so Lightroon is almost a free add on.

There are a number of new features that I like in LR such as the ability to edit gradients. I was always frustrated when I wanted to darken a sky for example, but there was a building or two that would get darkened as well…

LR also has face recognition built in. In theory LR can search through your photos, pick out faces and group similar faces together. In other words, you only have to name a face once and LR should name every other photo of that person… In Theory.

In Practice it takes a LOOOOOOOOOONG time to search a decent size database of photos. LR also seems to think any grouping of three shadows is a face as well. Naming faces is a bit hit and miss{{1}}. But the biggest problem is that LR crashes quite a bit while searching for faces. I think it may be because this process is so processor intensive that if LR has to do anything else, it freezes and needs to be restarted. So far these force quit and restart cycles have not lost any data that I can see, but it is very disconcerting.

Overall I am happy with Lightroom as a way to organize and catalogue photos. It is better than most DAM (Digital Asset Management) programs, and like I said, it kind of comes free with Photoshop. I think version  6 is fine to upgrade. Not sure I would pay for it if I did not have the CC subscription though…

 [[1]]Some of the mistakes are actually pretty funny. I have also noticed that LR sometimes gets confused between close relations. i.e. brother and sister are sometimes mixed up.[[1]]