Jun 20

Jun 20 Friday News Roundup for 20th June

Featured Image: "Seaweed in Bearna Harbour, Co. Galway"

There is one story dominating the headlines this week, and it is of course Adobe’s big announcements on wednesday. The company announced the latest versions of its Creative Cloud Apps, as well as a new version of Lightroom Mobile which now works on the iPhone, a new hardware stylus and ruler for use with iPad and other tablets, as well as making the Photography cloud subscription plan permanent.

There’s been lots of coverage of the Adobe announcements, and you’ve probably seen most of it by now, so I won’t re-hash everything. If you want to know more, DP Review has a good overview of the announcements from a photography perspective. Mac Stories also has a good overview of the announcements.

There has been some interesting reading with regard to people’s reactions to the Adobe announcements. Stu Maschwitz from Prolost.com has a great article on the implications of having Lightroom running on your phone. As he points out, for people who use an iPhone as their primary (or even secondary camera) it’s like having Lightroom running on your camera.

Scott Kelby has a good post responding to those who’ve complained that Adobe hasn’t kept its promise of lots of small upgrades that was part of the point of switching to the subscription model. Scott lists all the features that have been included over the past year in incremental updates. It’s a good read.

Khol Vinh has a good post about the announcements too, and points out the announcement that Adobe is opening up the Creative Cloud SDK to third party developers is actually a really big deal that may have gone unnoticed in the other announcements.

Lightroom 5.5 has been released too. This ads support for a few new cameras as well as some bug fixes. The new cameras supported in 5.5 are:

Canon PowerShot G1 X Mark II
Fujifilm FinePix S1
Nikon 1 J4
Nikon 1 S2
Nikon 1 V3
Olympus OM-D E-M10
Panasonic DMC-GH4
Pentax 645Z
Samsung NX3000
Sony DSC-RX100 III
Sony A7S (ILCE–7S)
Sony Alpha SLT-A77 II (ILCA–77M2)

For a complete list of all the bug fixes and other details of the 5.5 release, Adobe’s Lightroom Journal blog has the full details. Incidentally, the update has fixed one bug that has been long standing and a personal bugbear of mine: Fixed: “Initial rendition in Develop would sometimes appear posterized.” It’s about bloody time!

… In other news…

Ok, moving away from the Creative Cloud stuff, there has been some other things going on!

David Clelland has a first impressions report on the new Fujifilm 18–135 mm lens that I reported on at the start of the week. It looks like a great lens.

There’s been lots of Sony A7s news and reports hitting the web over the last little while now that the camera is getting into more hands. The results seem to be outstanding, and not just for video. Here are some reports that I found interesting:

Steve Huff has posted his first impressions of the A7s with lots of pictures. Steve has also posted a look at the low light capabilities of the camera which seem to be amazing.
Luminous Landscape contributor Michael Reichmann has posted his first impression of the A7s and compares its image quality to that of a medium format camera.
Imaging resource has posted some high ISO comparison shots with the new camera.
A7s Silent Shutter test by Chuljae Lee

That’s it for this week. There’s still time to sign up to the newsletter before the first issue goes out (which will be next week). If you come across anything interesting that you think I might want to include in the weekly roundup don’t hesitate to send me the details, but be warned I won’t post things that are obviously spam or an attempt to promote a product or service by the sender.

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