Lightroom 5 is out.... IS THERE FACIAL RECOGNITION?

[nekrosoft13]

So it seems lighroom 5 is leased.

http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop-lightroom.edu.html

Now to the question.. IS FACIAL RECOGNITION FINALLY IN LIGHTROOM?

[areohbee]

Why don't you download it, and then tell us?!

[Guest]

I'm absolutely astounded.  I have spent many hours learning Lightroom 5.  I took the Adobe courses; I took Steel Training.  I have spent many, many hours rating my photos and sorting them and creating smart collections.  I couldn't find facial recognition; nor could I find a way to write a description of a photo, something more than a few tags.  Last night I was working on my Mac Air, and I found to my utter amazement that not only does it have most all the same controls as lightroom for improving and editing a photo, and not only can I write a narrative about what we were doing and what the event was all about, but it asked me to label a face!  Then, the iPhoto told me it located 176 other photos with that face. it asked if I wanted to confirm them.  With a startling degree of accuracy, it displayed all the photos of that face and more.  All I had to do was CONFIRM or indicate that the face was NOT the same person.  It identified MY photo with and without a beard, mustache, hair, (and now 40 years later) bald.  It was absolutely unbelievable.  I didn't care that it had a few photos of my kids!  THey LOOK like me in facial bone structure.  It was amazing. 

Look ADOBE.  I don't have time to label 45000 old photos to find and designate one at a time with Keywords designating my various family members.  USE MATH! USE PROBABILITY.  It's obvious that the most recurring faces are my family and I don't mind labeling hundreds at a time while indicating the occasional error.  STOP trying to make your program perfect and give us facial recognition.  If it's not coming soon, let me know.  I am done fooling around trying to label thousands of old photos with the names of the people in them. 

As to the ability to write a brief narrative about a photo, I guess there must be a way, but after going through your videos and those of Phil Steele, I have yet to find it.  Don't you want to say something like - "After the wedding, we went over to Joe's place and played cards all night.  We were so wrecked for work on Monday."  You CANT put that in Key words alone.  How do I write my story!???   

Now I have to give up all I've put into the rating systems, and learning how to store photos in external drives, and backing up, etc.  becuase there is NO WAY I CAN JUSTIFY KEEPING YOUR PROGRAM when I can get the same photo manipulations tools PLUS narrative space AND facial recognition on MAC INCLUDED IN THE COST OF THE COMPUTER. 

I'd like to stay with you; please advise WHEN, if ever, YOU are going to release FR.  I don't care if it's perfect!  It's just a numbers game; give me 85 or 90% accuracy to lighten the load. 

Thanks!

[Geoff the kiwi]

You obviously cannot read Caption..... ranting here will do nothing. I suggest you might be happier sticking with iPhoto.

[areohbee]

Lr may have FR come Lr6 (can't say when, or even if, for sure, but it's been worked on for sure).

For now, if you do want to take advantage of FR in Lr5, you can do this:

* Use Picassa for FR.

* Import FR data using Jeffrey Friedl's plugin:

http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies/picasa-face-import

May not be worth the trouble (I've never done it, and jf himself admits it's "limitations").

But it might be the best you can do until Lr6...

Rob

[Geoff the kiwi]

The poster is already using iPhoto Rob.  Using three apps with crossover purposes is bound to lead to even more confusion and not something I would recommend at all, would you?

[areohbee]

To be clear: I don't recommend it, nor do I recommend against it - I was merely presenting an option that is available, which had not been brought up yet, and seemed germaine to the subject of this thread.

*if* the user wants to take advantage of Lightroom (understandable), and take advantage of facial recognition too (also understandable), then the option I presented is the only one I know of.

It's up to each individual which options suit the best..

Cheers,

Rob

[Geoff the kiwi]

For sure Rob, it is up to the individual.

Be careful what you post as it goes out on email before you edit to all who are subscribed.

And with that this thread is being closed.

[Ian Lyons]

No facial recognition.

[nekrosoft13]

Thank you, then no sale for the lazy adobe team

[Victoria Bampton LR Queen]

Lazy? You're kidding, right?  It's been only 15 months since LR4's release, and this is quite a lot of changes to fit into that time period. IMHO the performance improvements alone make it a great upgrade.

[CASpyr]

Victoria, it seems to me that the link in your message has a problem.

[Victoria Bampton LR Queen]

Thanks, fixed it.

[Guest]

and not much new in LR5 that is worth an upgrade... true for many of us.

i have photoshop.. so i don´t need local adjustments in LR.

your mileage may vary but i know many fellow photographer who will skip LR5 because it does not offer much for them.

Victoria Bampton wrote:

Lazy? You're kidding, right?  It's been only 15 months since LR4's release, and this is quite a lot of changes to fit into that time period. IMHO the performance improvements alone make it a great upgrade.

small fixes and workflow improvements mostly.

and really... i should pay adobe for fixing an "issue"?

i expect a good performance... other companys can do it so why not adobe?

the speed problems so many people encounter are a BUG in the program.

buy yeah im happy to pay for another version to get the speed issues fixed.......because im a dumb cash cow.

[nekrosoft13]

agree, if perfomance is better, they should have fixed that in LR4, new press release from Adobe "If you want better performance from lighroom, we will be happy to take your money again for something new should have fixed in LR4, we fixed it in LR5 instead."

[nekrosoft13]

no i'm not kidding, this is a very fast, very feature limited released. so they copied some stuff from photoshop... made another feature automated from manual. really nothing impressive.

this is just a way to make a quick buck.

[Lee_Jay]

nekrosoft13 wrote:

no i'm not kidding, this is a very fast, very feature limited released. so they copied some stuff from photoshop... made another feature automated from manual. really nothing impressive.

this is just a way to make a quick buck.

There was only one new feature in LR 4 that would have made me upgrade from LR 3 (local white balance control).  Mind you, one is enough for me to upgrade if it's one that I'll use a lot and that helps me a lot.  There are around five such new features in LR 5 that would make me upgrade from LR 4, making LR 5 a much bigger release for me than LR 4.

[MichaelWeening]

It isnt about laziness, it is about priorities.

The Lightroom team is SERIOUSLY missing a beat here. This should have been in the tool 2 years ago. This is a library management piece of software, and that is a core piece of functionality.

Ridiculous that it isnt there yet.

They need someone to help them prioritize.

[Keith Reeder]

MichaelWeening wrote:

They need someone to help them prioritize.

Clearly they have prioritised - but just because it's important to you, that doesn't make it a priority. Many (for all we know, a majority) have absolutely no interest whatsoever in FR, and would much rather see limited dev resources used elsewhere: addressing the performance issues users report is much more important than adding gimmicky, niche-use functionality like FR.

[bob frost]

I agree with Keith. Lots of things to improve before wasting time on face recognition. Unfortunately, they are obviously wasting time on it!

Bob frost

[nekrosoft13]

hey Keith if you want to fix your "performance issues" upgrade your computer.

Something so minor as "performance issues" caused by outdated  machine, should be the lowest priority.

New important features that improove and speed up workflow are more important.

[Keith Reeder]

Hey, Nekrosoft, I don't have performance problems - but I recognise that for those that do, who have done what they can themselves, performance is more important than gimmicky bells and whistles.

Personally, I'd consider layers to be of far more value in Lr than facial recognition - orders of magnitude more useful to the average user than facial recognition, I'm sure, especially given that much of the beneift of FR can be obtained by good keywording, if you're prepared to put the effort in.

.

[nekrosoft13]

I never said performance isn't important, there is no performance issue with lightroom. The real issue is old hardware people keep using, wrong architecture or insufficient hardware.

What you might find useful is not what everyone finds useful, deal with it.

So you said FR can't be substituted by good keywording? I'm not keywording 70,000+ images. FR can speed things up, since its mostly automated process.

And since you like to find "solution" to missing features, here is one for you, go use Photoshop for your layers, why would dev team bother with something like that.

[tudor@apmadoc.net]

be careful when you make blanket statements about performance

I used to fix one part of my computer at a time - upgrade from 8 to 12GB of ram one time, faster CPU the next.  Finally I built my own computer with the idea of ending the piecemeal upgrades

I now have a computer with

• i7-3930K - 6 core, 12 thread CPU
• 2 SSD drives, one for boot, one for the Lightroom catalog / previews
• 64 GB of memory

My Lighroom catalog is now over 200,000 photos.   "in general" there are no problems with Lightroom, however there are certain operations that are slow, even on my computer.

Would I love to have facial recognition?  Absolutely!  I stay awake tonight because I don't have it? Not at all

Would facial recognition slow things down?  Done right, you'd have it like an import or export background task, similar to the kind of thing you do if you change the default preview size and have LR rebuild all the previews.  I would set it up to run just as you leave work for the weekend.

[Keith Reeder]

Off you go back to Picasa then...