Lightroom 5 impressions

I've been using the public beta of Lightroom 5 for a few days now and thought I'd share my first impressions.  As I'm not a pro photographer, my usage of Lightroom is more akin to that of a "normal" amateur photographer so please bear that in mind when reading on.  I'm finding new features all the time but here are my thoughts on a couple that I will use a lot.  Thankfully they have not thrown away the main interfaces so it all has a nice familiar feel.

Reflecting on my workflow, I seem to do the majority of my photo handling in Lightroom, only going off to other programs when absolutely necessary.  In LR4, this meant anytime that cloning or more complex healing was needed for example.  With LR5 adobe have brought us a proper Cloning tool and Healing brush, which is great.  Not sure if its me but the healing brush seems to not be quite as good as the one in Photoshop but for simpler jobs the tools are great.

When knocking out dust spots, there's now a function that makes them more visible which is great as it means you get them all and quickly too.

There are tools for automatically straightening/levelling images and they do seem to work on most images so will be a useful addition.

A nice new feature (and its puzzling why it wasn't there all along), is a full screen mode.  Any picture can now be viewed quickly at full screen by pressing "f".  This is a really nice "little thing" that makes a big difference.

One thing which is not there though is an erase brush function on the gradient tool.  I use the gradient tool a lot but its a bit heavy handed, would be great to get the super smooth graduations of this tool but be able to brush them out where you don't want them.  Yes you can fudge it with the current adjustment brush but its not the same.

The other thing I would love to see is a facial recognition tool that can tag faces in the library.  I've tried it in Picassa and thought it worked really well and it could save ages and help keep your library organised.

I'm wondering though if  there is enough new in this release to be a new version, feels like Lightroom 4S to me at the moment.  Hopefully there's more goodies to be discovered!