I’ve been busy this weekend trying out my new upgrade to Lightroom 5. I have to say it has some really nice new features that make me wonder if I’ll be using Photoshop anymore in the future.

The upgrade itself was actually easier than I remember when I upgraded from Lightroom 3 to 4. This time when I upgraded to 5, I had the catalog from 4 upgraded to 5. Not only did my photo catalog migrate over, but all my settings, presets, photo previews, and plug-ins as well. I use a lot of plug-ins for my webpage design in Lightroom, so that was a great relief to see it move over seamlessly. I was up and publishing to my website in less than ten minutes using Lightroom 5 because of the quick catalog upgrade.

The one tool in Lightroom 5 I really like is the new spot removal tool. Before the spot removal tool was very basic and you had to use multiple circular entries to remove an object from a photo. Sometimes the end results didn’t look very good. Now the spot removal tool acts pretty close to the content aware fill tool in Photoshop. You can now click and drag across an object to correct imperfections or remove an item in a photo by utilizing the heal or clone options. This is a really big leap in the move to a one- stop software option for photo editing.

I’ll be busy over the next week going over my Lightroom upgrade and following some great tutorials on how to utilize its new features. If you’d like a really great e-book on Lightroom 5, please check out Michael Frye’s new book “Landscapes in Lightroom 5” by clicking here. The book also comes with instructional videos and presets to add to the development module in Lightroom.