Adobe announced today the immediate availability of a release candidate for Lightroom 5.2. This has been tested internally, but is released to the Lightroom community early for additional testing and feedback ahead of the official release. You can download Lightroom 5.2 RC on Adobe Labs here. As I usually suggest, if you have no immediate need for the features and the bug fixes and new camera support don’t affect you, I would wait for the official version to be released. However, note that some of the bug fixes are substantial this time.

Lightroom 5.2 RC includes a few small new features, bug fixes, and new camera support.

New features:

In the following video, I show you the new features:

And here is a written summary of the new features:

1. Spot Removal Tool

  • Feather Slider

Lightroom 5.2 Spot Removal Feather Slider

This is a “small” addition that for me increases the power of this tool greatly. As I explain in my video on how to use the spot removal tool/ advanced healing brush in Lightroom 5, I usually work in Heal mode. However, when working up against a high contrast edge, Heal can cause bleeding along the edge of my fix. In these cases I turn to clone mode. However, up until now the edge of the clone fix was often too harsh. Now we can use the feather slider to adjust this edge. (It works on both clone and heal.)

  • In Lightroom 5.2 RC, there has also been an improvement in how Lightroom automatically picks a source area for your fix, for images with textured areas like rocks, bark and foliage.
  • In addition, auto-find now prefers source areas within your crop — in 5.0 it would often pick an area outside your crop, which made finding that source difficult.

2. Color Noise Smoothness Slidersmoothness-slider-lightroom-5-2

  • The color noise slider previously present has been great at removing pixel-level color noise. This new smoothness slider now also removes larger color blobs that you may find when you brighten very-much underexposed areas of a photograph:
lightroom 5-2-smoothness

CLICK TO SEE LARGER

3. Refinement to the Adjustment Brush, Graduated Filter and Radial Filter

  • Right Click (PC) / Control-click (Mac) on an adjustment pin to bring up a context menu to duplicate or delete

pin-right-click-lightroom-5-2

 

Lightroom 5.0 Bugs Corrected in Lightroom 5.2 Release Candidate:

  • Catalog containing images processed with PV2003 were adding a post-crop vignette when catalog upgraded to Lightroom 5.
  • Pressing the “Reset” button while holding down the Shift key caused Lightroom to exit abruptly.
  • Output Sharpening and Noise Reduction were not applied to exported images that were resized to less than 1/3 of the original image size.
  • Incorrect photo was selected when trying to select a photo in segmented grid in Publish Services.
  • The Esc key did not exit the slideshow after right clicking screen with mouse during slideshow playing.
  • Import dialog remained blank for folders that contain PNG files with XMP sidecars.
  • Metadata panel displayed incorrect information after modifying published photo. Please note that this only occurred when metadata was changed after the photo was published.

New Camera Support in Lightroom 5.2 Release Candidate (* denotes preliminary support)

  • Canon EOS 70D*, Casio Exilim EX-ZR800, Fujifilm FinePix HS22EXR, Fujifilm FinePix HS35EXR, Fujifilm FinePix S205EXR, Fujifilm FinePix F805EXR, Fujifilm X-M1, Phase One IQ260*, Sony DSC-RX1R, Sony DSC-RX100 II*

New Lens Profile Support in Lightroom 5.2 Release Candidate

  • Sony Sony E 35mm F1.8 OSS, Hasselblad Hasselblad LF16mm F2.8, Hasselblad Hasselblad LF18-55mm F3.5-5.6 OSS,Hasselblad Hasselblad LF18-200mm F3.5-6.3 OSS, GoPro GoPro Hero3 Black, GoPro GoPro Hero3 Silver, GoPro GoPro Hero3 White
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