As reported by PhotoRumors.com, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 6 has been announced ahead of schedule by fnac (a retail giant in France) and eyo, an online outlet from Australia.

I've copy and pasted the supposed feature list below from PhotoRumors.com, which itself is reportedly a google translation of the French language post on fnac's website. The one feature that seems to be universally sticking out as an exciting point is that there may be GPU (graphics processing unit, or graphics/video card) support. Specifically the bullet point translates to: “Lightroom leverages compatible graphics process to get you better performance, especially when you edit your images in the Develop module”.

Personally I'm excited by “Import and refine your photos in record time”. Importing is much slower in Lightroom 5, and the entire import/organize process leaves a lot to be desired, when compared to Aperture. I also see Faces as a feature I hadn't noticed in Lightroom before.

Keep in mind that as of this moment (Thursday Feb 19, 2015 @ 7:30am PST), the official Adobe Photoshop Lightroom site still shows version 5, but last I checked Lightroom wasn't one of those products that people went out of their way to create false rumors and photoshopped product mock-ups around, like the iPhone. So it seems likely that this is true. I have reached out to Adobe for comment; if I hear anything back I'll update this post.

Thanks to @DCinKingston on twitter for bringing this to my attention.

Here's the (google translated from French) feature list. Translation missteps are pretty funny… I'm a fan of image clichés ;-)

Key features of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 6

Environment nondestructive

Unleash your creativity in a nondestructive editing environment that allows you to test your ideas freely. The originals remain intact and you can easily cancel your edits or save multiple versions of a cliché.

Advanced conversion feature black and white

Monitor closely the tonal qualities so essential to the black and white photos. Combine precisely the information of eight color layers in the grayscale conversion.

Development predefined settings

Save time by instantly applying the desired effect to your images.

Just save develop settings as a preset and apply them to other photos in a click. If Lightroom includes dozens of presets, thousands more are offered by third parties.

Face Recognition

Quickly find pictures of loved ones, even without metadata tags. You select a face on the photo, Lightroom and search the person it belongs to all of your other shots. Sort and group your photos by faces.

Sophisticated Healing Brush

Get best pictures with one touch. Set the brush size and move it according to specific plots. Unwanted items and other imperfections, including irregular shapes son type, magically disappear.

Upright (Vertically)

Straighten skewed images with a single click. The Upright tool (Vertically) analyzes the image and detects horizontal or vertical lines inclined. It can even recover images without horizon.

Merge to HDR

Create realistic or surreal images from high-contrast scenes. By merging HDR, you can easily combine photos with different exposures into a single HDR image.

Fusion panoramas

Realize XXL ultra detailed panoramas. Photo merge technology lets you merge multiple images, including raw files, to create panoramas out of the ordinary.

Performance gains

Import and refine your photos in record time. Lightroom leverages compatible graphics process to get you better performance, especially when you edit your images in the Develop module.

Sophisticated video slideshows

Create stunning slideshows combining still images, movies and music, and supplement them with pan and zoom effects, for example.

Optimized web galleries

Present your work in the most elegant web galleries, more attractive and interactive. The new models of HTML5 compatible galleries are supported by many browsers and mobile devices work stations.

Integration of online sharing

Easily publish images on social networks and sites for such as Facebook and Flickr. On some sites, you can even view the online comments on your images directly from Lightroom Library.

Creating photo books

Create beautiful photo books. Lightroom includes a large number of user-friendly catalog templates that you can now customize. Load them then printing a few clicks.