the recognition it deserves is the filter brush. When you apply an adjustment such as a graduated filter, you previously were not able to mask areas. So, using the panorama image above as an example, making the sky darker blue would also affect the snow on the mountains. The filter brush lets you paint areas to be included or excluded from the overall effect. FACIAL RECOGNITION One reason I prefer Lightroom to other photo organisers is its extensive support for adding metadata that makes it easy to find photos later. The capability to identify and recognise faces has been part of iPhoto, Aperture and Adobe’s own Photoshop Elements for years, but if you wanted to identify people in Lightroom you’d have to do it by assigning your own keyword tags. Now Lightroom CC can help you out. The feature shows up as just another view in the Library module – look for the People button just above the filmstrip – and operates as we’ve come to expect in other applications: Lightroom locates faces, and you identify a few to get started. The more photos you identify, the better Lightroom does in locating people in other photos. Initially I was surprised that the feature seems to be (forgive me) skin deep. Although it can locate and identify people, you won’t find a People attribute or metadata category when performing a search or creating smart collections. It turns out, however, that Lightroom is doing something basic and clever: people are identified as keywords, so to find photos of someone in my library, all I need to do is a text search for their name. According to Adobe, the People keywords are treated separately under the hood – to help maintain privacy, those keywords are removed before exporting or sharing the photo. You can choose to override that default in the Export dialogue. SLIDESHOWS The last area to receive a sizable update is the Slideshow module, which adds a few ways to customise slideshows. A show can now include up to 10 songs (hopefully preventing countless earworms in the process). and the slide changes can be synced to the music. In my testing, Lightroom did a good job of making this seem natural. And an Audio Balance slider lets you choose which audio is dominant when you include video clips in the slideshow. Adobe has also added a Pan and Zoom slider to add motion to each slide. The setting applies to the entire slideshow, so you won’t have the type of granular control you would get from dedicated slideshow applications, but the feature works fine. Bottom line. Maybe Adobe has been too busy to realise that it’s won the market of photo organisational and editing software. More likely, the Lightroom developers understand that winning at software is an illusion as long as upstarts (like Lightroom when it started out) are out there. Lightroom CC is a welcome update that builds on its predecessor, not only in terms of features but also in performance. That’s a win in my book. Lightroom CC is available through Adobe’s Creative Cloud subscription service. A stand-alone version, Lightroom 6 is also available, but doesn’t include any Creative Cloud features such as synchronisation with Lightroom mobile. -JEFF CARLSON I III ADOBE S ^ S S ^ www.adobe.com PROS Improved performance; new filter brush; built-in HDR and panorama merge features CONS Older computers will see minimal or no performance increases; it would be nice to see people more specifically included in searches and smart collections $10/M0NTH WITH CREATIVE CLOUD PHOTOGRAPHY SUBSCRIPTION. UP TO $50/M0NTH AS PART OF OTHER CREATIVE CLOUD SUBSCRIPTIONS. AVAILABLE ON ITS OWN AS LIGHTROOM 6 FOR $149 JULY 201 5 anthonycaruana.com/ REVIEWS Link Power A lmost every iPhone and iPad user has seen the dreaded There is not enough available storage. . message when trying to take a photo, shoot a video or download some new music from the iTunes Store. Unlike many Android devices, Apple has seen fit to not allow users to expand the storage in their iDevices. And we’ve all run out of battery at exactly the moment we least can afford to. Imation’s answer to these problems is the Power Drive – a clever device that combines an extra 16GB, 32GB or 64GB of storage with a 3000mAh battery pack. The Power Drive is very compact. At about 6 X 7 X 2cm, you’ll barely notice it in your bag. There are two cable connectors integrated into the case – USB and Lightning. When connected to your Mac, you can copy photos, video and other content from your Mac to one of the folders that has been added to the device at the factory. That connection will also charge the Power Drive’s battery. The Lightning connection lets you charge your iPhone or access data on the Power Drive. The Power Drive’s battery will fully recharge your iPhone once with enough juice left over for another three-quarter charge. There’s a small button on the top of the Power Drive with four small LEDs. imation The button activates the charging capability, so you can use the Power Drive to access data without sucking the battery dry if you don’t need it. We copied a bunch of documents, images, music and movies to the Power Drive via USB from our MacBook. The connection is only USB 2, so it will take a little bit of time if you’re planning to use the Power Drive for several gigabytes of data. In order to use the Power Drive on our iPhone, we needed to download a free app. The app includes its own video and audio players, as well as a document viewer. When we viewed a Word Document we could read it; however, to edit the document we could use the Share button to send the document to Word. However, that results in another copy of the document being added to the iPhone’s local storage. Audio playback worked well. We copied albums purchased from the iTunes Store from our MacBook’s iTunes library to the Power Drive. To access the songs, or any other content, we browsed the folders on the device. As long as we kept things organised, finding content was easy. We did hit some snags with video playback. We copied a movie we’d purchased from the iTunes Store to the Power Drive. Unfortunately, playback simply failed. There was no dialogue box or any explanation. We tapped on the movie, the video player launched and then shut down, dumping us back to the app’s file browser. With videos we’d shot that were saved as M4V files, they opened in the video player, but stopped after a second of playback. If, however, we copied video stills on our iPhone that were in the MOV format to the Power Drive they played without any problems. If your iPhone is running low on capacity, you can easily copy content from what the Link app calls your ‘Media Library’. This is actually only your Photos library. While that can be useful for copying photos and videos for a backup, you can’t give yourself more local storage by moving music or other files to the Power Link. – ANTHONY CARUANA
Originally published in Macworld Australia on 1 July 2015: https://archive.org/details/Macworld_July_2015_AU#page/n65