The launch of Lightroom 6 appears to be just around the corner with March 9, 2015 being the suspected release date. Photo Rumors uncovered a leak at a French retailer of the new Lightroom 6 box art (seen above) and some of the key new features, which look very impressive.
The big new features include:
- Face recognition without metadata tagging
- Merge to HDR for combining multiple photos with different exposures into a single HDR image
- Fusion panoramas for merging multiple files (including RAW files) to create panoramas in Lightroom
- GPU acceleration for image editing
- Sophisticated video slideshows that allow you to combine images, movies and music, along with adding Ken Burns effect to images
- Optimized web galleries with HTML5 compatible galleries
These are all great additions if this leak turns out to be legit. Based on other info in the leak, there appears to be a retail prices for Lightroom 6, which would negate some rumors that have been floating around suggesting that Lightroom 6 would make the exclusive move to Creative Cloud. Of course, you still need Creative Cloud to take advantage of some of the great features inside of Lightroom mobile.
As noted previously, Lightroom 6 will be a 64-bit only application and will require Windows 7 or higher; or OS X 10.8 or higher to run.
