Performance & Interface

The design of the interface is unchanged with the exception of the new options and features appearing in their respective modules. The clean, uncluttered arrangement of thumbnails, options and adjustments is sublime and the dark grey interface with a light grey tone in the centre gives it a modern appearance without feeling daunting for beginners.

In use, we experienced no teething troubles with the new features when running it on a 3.2GHz Intel Core i3 iMac, but we did pick up on a couple of other minor issues. Low-resolution files didn’t seem to retain the sharpening and noise reduction adjustments we’d applied after they’d been exported, and the files we had selected in the grid view weren’t the same as those selected in the filmstrip.

Adobe stressed that the filmstrip selection of images is the correct selection to go by and promises that a future update (expected as this issue went to press) will address these annoying grid selection and exporting bugs. The program otherwise ran smoothly with no infuriating delays.

The Advanced Healing Brush makes it a lot easier to achieve flawless cloning results when attempting to remove larger imperfections, where previously images may have had to be worked on in Photoshop.

One area that hasn’t been improved in Lightroom 5 is the Preset list. In a future version we’d like an even longer list of creative and artistic presets that could be applied with a single click. One example could be a tilt/shift effect or maybe artistic and distressed border edge presets.

We know Adobe already has some of this functionality within Photoshop Elements, so maybe it won’t be long before Lightroom adopts it too?