Has some new features including face recognition, panorama merge and HDR. Upgrade around £59.

You can download a thirty day free trial.

I'm not convinced it's worth the current upgrade price. I do have Photoshop Elements which is good for creating the occasional panoramic. For HDR, I use Luminance.

I've been playing with Snapseed v2 recently, it's free, by Nik Software (now owned by Google). The HDR feature is very good, as are many of the other filters and enhancements, a good alternative to Lightroom if you don't fancy splashing the cash.

I find that there are a lot of great apps on the iPad that can do similar image processing for a much cheaper cost and have some great features.

Sean.

I have the full Photoshop but I have found a free piece of software which actually beats it on many points. It's called GIMP but I warn you, it takes a bit of learning. There are free downloadable manuals and it's worth the effort of learning how to use it as it can do many things that Photoshop can't.

http://www.gimp.org/downloads/

PS They do the Mac and Linux versions as well.

Lightroom is a tool for photographers who primarily deal with RAW files. It helps you to 'Develop' them. It can output them as virtually any sort of bitmap image file. And it's completely non-destructive, saving all changes back into the RAW or DNG file. So it's not really your average kind of pixel 'image processor' and can't really be compared with them.

It's a great piece of software but that said I'm less than convinced about this latest incarnation. The Adobe business model is suspect to say the least and I'm not really sure why Adobe thinks that these additions are the sort of things needed by Lightroom users. They feel like things have been added just to keep the ball rolling on the CC concept. And I can't for the life of me why any Lightroom user  except maybe a pro paparatzi would want anything like Face recognition anyway. Ideas on a postcard plse.

I suspect they are merging some of their product features, taking the panorama feature from Photoshop and adding to Lightroom as an enhancement to keep the upgrade fees rolling in. The Creative Cloud is an option, probably good value if you are a keen photographer or pro, but I didn't think it was value for money for me so bought Lightroom outright.

I've used GIMP to do some exposure blending, it's complex, but there a lot of tutorials on YouTube and the like. I can also recommend Paint.NET which can do a lot of things, also free. Lightroom will remain my main tool, but for on the go editing and tweaking, Snapseed is very good.

OK, just to be clear, I was only mentioning LR6 was available for those people who use it; wasn't trying to open a discussion on pros/cons of image editing software although that could be a good thread.

Reason I upgraded was for the HDR element; previously I would have to do that in PS but as I no longer have PS installed, a solution has presented itself  😀  PS was far too complicated for me and I never had the time to learn it. If I get the time, I might invest in some tuition from someone though.

My only bug bear with Adobe now is that they was everything on this ridiculous "creative cloud". I am old school; I like to have my software installed on my machine and I do not store anything on the internet - for obviously security risks.

Raw to the Core as they say, tried the rest stick with the best!

Raw to the Core as they say, tried the rest stick with the best!

I'd personally agree that RAW files give a huge range of options and we use them exclusively.

However as with all things, it all depends on what you want from your photography/photographs. If all you're doing is taking a snapshot or saving a quick memory of a place or all you do is upload your photos to social media etc etc then there's absolutely nothing wrong with a JPEG, especially if your camera processes them well. And in those cases, RAW certainly isn't actually the best. 🙂

Horses for courses, as always.

Very true, but as I often have to produce poster size and beyond its the only one I use