Featuring a new Crop-related tool for the
Creative Cloud subscribers: Guided Upright!
Along with the normal updates for new camera support, new lens support, bug fixes and the like, there are a couple of important changes to Lightroom with his update.
A New Develop Panel:
Both the Perpetual License holders and the Creative Cloud subscribers will notice there is a new panel in the Develop module.
Transform now appears, tucked neatly between Lens Corrections and Effects. The Upright functions have been migrated from the Lens Corrections to the Transform panel. The Manual tab adjustments from the Lens Corrections panel have been moved to the new Transform panel as well. The Lens Correction panel is now simplified from four tabs to two leaving Profile and Manual as the only tabs left. Lens correction adjustments and chromatic aberration reduction are the primary functions of the Lens Correction Panel now.
A New Tool:
For those of you in the Creative Cloud family, there is a new tool in addition to these changes: The Guided Upright Tool!
The Guided Upright tool lives in the upper left corner and gives you the ability to draw straight lines on your image. Simply use the tool to click and then drag along a line in your image that should be vertical and release. Drawing two vertical correction lines will cause Lightroom to automatically correct your scenes perspective. Use Aspect to fine-tune your image’s apparent width.
As you can see in the example, two lines correct the perspective of this shot by forcing what I want to be vertical, to vertical! You can draw two lines for vertical correction and two lines to correct horizontal perspective.
In this example, I’ve used four lines to correct the four sides of the door frame – two horizontal and two vertical. In addition, you have the ability use the Transform tools to tweak your automatic corrections via either Upright or the Guided Upright tool.
You are limited to four guide lines: two each, horizontal and vertical.
Anytime you correct for distortion or perspective you are removing pixels from the rectangular final image format: the essence of this tool’s exposure in Holy Crop! You can either use the Scale slider in the Transform section of the new Transform panel or click the Constrain Crop option with which Lightroom users are so familiar to remove the excess empty space spawned in these types of transformations.
One of the coolest parts of this new tool is that you can zoom in to apply it. How often have we wished the Level tool in the Crop panel would allow us to zoom in on an image to use it? The Guided Upright guides can be inserted, deleted and tweaked all while zoomed in on your wonky image.
In the image above, the image is zoomed 1:1 to allow for more precise placement of the guides.
All in all, this is a great new tool for wide-angle photographers, particularly those whose subject matter skews architecturally. The ante has been upped for correcting perspective in Lightroom. A tool like this was long overdue and very welcome.
Rikk Flohr © 2016
