Adobe’s Lightroom hits version 5 with sub-$200 photo-processing

Photographers who want to sort their collection of digital images out and process them like an old school darkroom now have a new piece of software to consider, as Adobe lets Lightroom 5 out, offering more for less than $200.

While Photoshop is often considered the must have program for budding photographers to learn, it’s previously high price tag and ridiculously large feature set has often stopped people.

In the past few years, Adobe has suggested Elements for those who needed a simple best of everything, but it wasn’t for everyone, either.

Rather, for photographers who desired a system to catalog their shots, to index them and then subsequently process them using styles more like that of an analogue environment, Adobe created Lightroom.

Now in its fifth version, the program brings with it some changes that have seen the light of day in Photoshop, but have been refined to work with the Lightroom system better, correcting photos more quickly and adding effects when needed for photos to make them have a more retro look.

Previewed in April and released in a public beta that expires at the end of this month, the new Lightroom arrives with skew correction to fix wide-angled images suffering from distortion, the addition of a radial gradient tool to make vignettes, a healing brush to remove elements from a photo, and easily generated video slideshows, as well as strong black and white conversions tools.

Aside for the functionality of the program, it’s also one of the few Adobe programs able to be bought in retail, with the product available both online through Adobe’s Creative Cloud as well as at retailers.

Pricing for the new Lightroom looks fairly consistent, too, with upgrade pricing coming in at $99 while the full installation will cost $186.