Adobe’s Lightroom Product Manager, Tom Hogarty, announced that Lightroom is now available on the Apple Mac Store (for North America only). I think overall it’s a good move for Lightroom. For new Lightroom users out there who are on the Mac store and may never have otherwise heard of Lightroom, this is just another way to get it into their hands. However, there area few, caveats, shall we say

1) It’s for Mac only (duh!). This probably doesn’t seem bad if you only own Macs. However, I can tell you from being on the road teaching Lightroom over the last few weeks, there’s LOTS of people out there that have both a Windows and Mac machine. The boxed version and download version of Lightroom can be installed on both Mac and PC.

2) Updates will take place through the Mac store. From personal experience of being the managing editor of a digital magazine (Light It magazine) that’s delivered through the Mac App Store, that (sometimes) approvals can be a pain in the neck. So, when Adobe feels an update is ready they’ll release it. That doesn’t mean it’ll be immediately available on the App store though, as it may take a few days.

3) There’s no upgrade pricing. So basically, if you have LR1, 2 or 3, you can can’t get the upgrade price to 4 (only $79) on the App store. Instead, you’ll pay $149. And there’s no guarantee that when 5 comes out, and you bought LR4 on the App store, that you’d be able to upgrade as well.

My Take: I kinda wonder if I’m alone in doing what I do. But, I have a Mac and when I see software I want to buy that’s on the App store, the first thing I do is go to the software makers website to see if I can buy it direct from them. For me at least, I prefer to buy a copy of the software straight from them. I may be crazy, paranoid, whatever… but that’s just the way I do it. That said, if I can’t buy it directly from the developer, then I have no problem buying something through the App store. It’s just not my first choice. And remember, Adobe’s just trying to create another channel for which to buy Lightroom (if you owned a product you’d make sure you’d get it out there in as many stores as you could right?). They can’t control the App store policies when it comes to upgrades and updates. Anyway, just thought I’d let you guys know what the deal is. Hope you have a great weekend.

The Spring Color, Flare & Haze Collection was designed to add a sun-kissed touch to your natural light images. They’ll work best on your RAW images and were designed for both Lightroom 3 and 4, as you’ll see in the download below.
(Special thanks to Spanki Mills and Jen Carver for the beautiful examples provided)

You can find out more about the presets and the entire collection over at her website (www.lightroompresets.com) or facebook page (www.facebook.com/PrettyPresets)

$#x2022; Here’s the link to download the presets for Lightroom 4.
$#x2022; Here’s the link to download the presets for Lightroom 3.
$#x2022; Here’s a video that’ll help you install and organize your presets.
$#x2022; Here’s a couple before/after examples (click to see larger).

• A new date was just added to my Lightroom 4 Live tour. We’ll be in Lansing MI on June 12th. It also looks like we’ll be in Washing DC that same week and probably San Francisco the week after but I’ll keep you posted.
• Lightroom 4.1 Release Candidate 2 is on the Adobe Labs website. If you had any problems with Lightroom 4, it’s definitely worth downloading.

Lightroom Product Manager, Tom Hogarty, has a great write up about some of the new Color Fringe Correction features in Lightroom 4

• Moose Peterson’s BT Journal is now available on the iPad.
• Don’t forget about the Student Discount for the Google Plus Photographers Conference. It’s just $99 for students with the code… wait for it… GPLUSSTUD. Gotta love that promo code huh?
• I’ve been getting a TON of questions on the difference between Photoshop (and Bridge) and Lightroom. If you’re still wondering if Lightroom is for you then check out the videos that Scott and I did called 100 Ways that Lightroom Kick’s The Bridge’s Ass for Photographers.

Have a great weekend everyone!

The Presets:

• Click here to download the presets.
• Here’s a video that’ll help you install and organize your presets.
• Here’s a before/after examples (click to see it larger).

1. Camera Raw: Camera Raw is now up to par with Lightroom 4 so they’re basically the same thing (comparing to the Develop module of course). Sure, I use Lightroom most of the time, but I still use ACR too. When some one hands me a file to work on, I don’t import it into my Lightroom library and all that. I usually just open it up in ACR. If you find yourself editing random photos here and there, then you’ll want to consider upgrading.

2. Content Aware Improvements: To me, this is a must have. There’s a new Content Aware Move tool that let’s you move part of one photo to another and attempts to fill in the gap that you leave behind. With the right image, it works great. Wrong image… eh… But throw that in with the content-aware option added to the Patch tool and I think it’ makes a pretty compelling feature to consider for retouching.

3. New Adaptive Wide Angle Filter: This one is pretty cool. Lightroom has the Lens Correction panel which works great. But I have to admit, I’ve been jumping to Photoshop to use the new Wide Angle filter more often now if I’m trying to fix perspective problems from wide angle shots.

4. Background and Auto-Save: If you’re working with large images (especially when you consider the file size of images from, say, a camera like the new Nikon D800), you wind up spending a lot of time saving your images and waiting. With Background Save, you can continue to work while it saves in the background. It’s the kinda thing that you have to experience. If you’re not working with really large files, it’s probably not an issue. But if you are, you’ll probably upgrade in a heartbeat once you see this in action.

5. Blur Filters: The new blur filters are a little more gimmicky in my opinion. It’s not a huge selling point for me personally, but if you’re creative and like to mess around with pseudo-blur techniques, then it’s something you’ll at least want to check out.

6. Crop Tool: For Lightroom users, this one isn’t too overwhelming. We’ve had great cropping since Lightroom 1 so now Photoshop is catching up. Still, I crop in Photoshop a lot too, so it’s nice to have a similar experience now

7. The Dark Interface: It’s definitely not a huge selling point, but it does sweeten the pot. Especially for Lightroom users. Face it – our photos just look better against a dark interface right?

8. Video: If you’re shooting a lot of DSLR video, I think you’ll find that Photoshop may just be the tool that actually gets you editing video. My co-Photoshop Guy RC Concepcion said it best, when he explained that now we can edit video in a program that we’re used to working in, rather than learning an entirely new program to do it. I still haven’t caught the video “bug” yet, but I do have to say the upgrades Adobe has done with video have been catching the eye of even the video pros that are out there.

9. Skin-Tone Selection: If you’re adjusting skin tones, then the new feature in the Select > Color Range dialog can come in handy. For example, if you’re trying to remove the red from some one’s face, you can quickly select their skin tone and use Hue/Saturation to reduce the red (rather than manually brushing and masking). This one is a hard call for me. I totally think it’s a cool feature, it’s just not something I’ve used much yet so the jury is still out. I guess you have to think to yourself how many times you try to select some one’s skin. If that’s a lot, then you’ll definitely get your money’s worth out of this feature.

10. Overall speed improvements: Speed is always a tough sell. Once you use something that’s faster for about a day or two, it becomes second nature and it doesn’t “feel” faster anymore. So, to me at least, speed didn’t seem like anything great. But after using CS6 for a few weeks and going back to CS5 to do some videos a while back, I can say that the speed improvements are the real deal. I mean, I use Liquify all the time for retouching and that tool alone is 1000% faster than it ever was. Overall though, the whole program just feels zippier (I can’t believe my spellcheck didn’t come up on zippier!)

10.5. Some old tools return: They also added Lighting Effects and Contact Sheet back in. I guess you can call them features for photographers “technically”. Lighting Effects is definitely cool if you’re looking to add some mood to your photos. And if you’re creating Contact Sheets (which is back in CS6) that’s not a bad tool either, but if you’re a Lightroom user then we can just do contact sheets in the Print module.

If I had to choose, I’d say that Content Aware enhancements, the Adaptive Wide Angle Filter, Background and Auto-save, and the Camera Raw enhancements make the upgrade worth it for photographers. Throw in the speed improvements and I think any Lightroom user who uses Photoshop would be happy with their $169 (after NAPP member discount) upgrade cost. Hope this helps a little.

First off, I wanted to say thanks to everyone who came out to my Lightroom 4 Live seminar in Minneapolis yesterday. There were almost 350 photographers there. We had a great crowd, lots of laughs and everyone I spoke to seemed to learn a lot throughout the day (in spite of my poor drinking habits – sorry inside joke… you had to be there – and no, it has nothing to do with alcohol)
If you’re in LA or Chicago, you can still sign up for seminars this week (Thursday in LA and Monday in Chicago).

In other news, Adobe officially announced CS6 yesterday. In celebration of the announcement, the Photoshop Guys over at NAPP are doing some free live webcasts called 6 Days of CS6. It started yesterday and continues throughout the week (schedule is below). I’ll be on today with a free webcast that goes over Photoshop CS6′s new features for photographers. I’m traveling the rest of the week doing more Lightroom seminars, but you can catch the guys doing webcasts all week. Here’s the schedule and I hope you’ll be able to join us.