Monthly Archives: October 2017

Adobe Launches all new desktop – Lightroom CC

The Adobe Max conference provides the company with an opportunity to showcase new applications to the great and good of  designers, photographers, web coders, video-makers, illustrators, and developers. At this years event, held in Las Vegas, they announced a brand new application for photographers – Lightroom CC on Desktop. Below is a brief overview of this new application.

So what is Lightroom CC on Desktop and who is it for?

Lightroom CC is designed and built around 3 guiding principles:

  • Powerful Yet Simple – Lightroom CC will offer the powerful image editing that you want, while being simple and intuitive to use. Adobe’s goal is that it will have everything you need and nothing you don’t.
  • Seamless experience across all your devices – Lightroom CC will work the same across desktop, mobile and web. This allows you to move across your devices without needing to relearn. Your photos and edits are all where you’d expect them to be.
  • Cloud Based – Everything you do in Lightroom CC is synced to the cloud. This means that you can access and work with your photos from any device (including multiple computers), and can easily share photos with others. All of your photos and all of the work that you do with them will be automatically backed up all the time.

Lightroom CC is based on a subscription model rather than a perpetual licence. This may, be a barrier for some, but then again Lightroom Classic is also subscription only now.

The various subscription plans that Adobe are offering include, the existing Creative Cloud Photography plan available to Lightroom Classic and Photoshop customers. This plan will include a fairly meagre 20GB or Cloud storage for $9.99/month, but is really only intended as taster. However, for an additional $10/month, you can increase storage to 1TB. Alternatively, you can choose to skip Lightroom Classic and Photoshop but take the 1TB of storage instead, and this again will cost $9.99/month.

Interface and Use

Turning now to the application itself, we can see that the UI is broadly similar in appearance and content to Lightroom CC for mobile and web clients. This approach is consistent with with the objective of making all of the client applications in CC ecosystem

Lightroom CC on Desktop – My Photos View

The above screenshot shows Lightroom CC in the ‘My Photos’ view with ‘Square grid enabled. However, as with Lightroom CC for mobile devices there is also a ‘Photo grid’ view, which arranges the photos so that they use the grid space in a more optimised way.

To enable the left or right side panels you can click on one of the buttons or use keyboard shortcuts (i.e. ‘P’ for the left side panel and ‘E’, “I’ or’K’ for the right side panel). The following screenshots shows the application in ‘Edit’, ‘Keywords’ and ‘Info’ view, respectively.

Edit View

Keywords View

Info View

The ‘My Photos’ panel shows a list of imported or synced photos by date.

You can also create individual ‘Albums’, and organise multiple albums within a folder hierarchy.

My Photos

Photos can be added to multiple albums, and will be synced to all devices within your CC ecosystem.

Lightroom CC on Desktop displays much less information on thumbnails than Lightroom Classic, and many will find the absence of badges to indicate whether a photo has been edited or not less than helpful. The little information provided in the form of badges is shown on below screenshot.

Thumbnail Badges

The thumbnails also have a context menu, from which you can quickly access some commands.

Thumbnail Context Menu

The right side ‘Edit’ panel largely mirrors the location and adjustments currently available for iOS and Android devices. However, we can expect to see new adjustments being added over time.

Tone and Colour Adjustments

Search

Searching in Lightroom CC uses Sensei machine-learning technology to identify features in images. In theory, this makes every image in your catalog searchable based on its content without you having to apply keywords/tags. However, in reality it’s not always as accurate as some would have us believe. For example, I typed ‘mountain’ into the search field and obtained below results. As you can see, some of the images are a long way’s from being a mountain. That being said, for many photographers it’s sufficiently accurate that they’ll not bother applying their own keywords to images.

Photo Search

Photo Storage

Local storage of your images is supported, although Adobe’s preferred storage location is the cloud. The following screenshot shows how you can configure the application to store some or all of your photos locally as well as on the cloud.

Local Storage Preference

Syncing Photos with the cloud

Unlike Lightroom Classic all photos added to Lightroom CC on Desktop will automatically be synced to the Adobe Cloud and your mobile devices. However, there may be occasions when you would prefer to delay sync to take place until later. To do so, simply click on the cloud badge at top right corner of the application, then click on the Pause button as shown below.

Pause Syncing

Above has been a veery quick overview of Lightroom CC on Desktop. If you would like more information on the application or other apps within the Lightroom CC ecosystem then visit the Getting Started page. Adobe have also provided a number of short tutorials to help prospective users quickly get up and running:

  1. Explore the application
  2. Add and organise photos
  3. Use Lightroom CC with Photoshop
  4. Edit your photos from anywhere

Minimum Hardware and OS requirements

Windows 

  • Intel® or AMD processor with 64-bit support*
  • Windows 10 (64-bit) Version 1511 or later
  • 4 GB of RAM (8 GB recommended)
  • 1 GB of Video RAM (VRAM). 2 GB of dedicated VRAM is suggested for large, high-resolution monitors, such as 4K- and 5K-resolution monitors
  • 10 GB of available hard-disk space
  • OpenGL 3.3 and DirectX 10-capable video adapter for GPU-related functionality
  • Internet connection and registration are necessary for required software activation, validation of subscriptions, and access to online services.

macOS

  • Multicore Intel processor with 64-bit support*
  • MacOS 10.12 (Sierra), Mac OS X v10.11 (El Capitan)
  • 4 GB of RAM (8 GB recommended)
  • 1 GB of Video RAM (VRAM). 2 GB of dedicated VRAM is suggested for large, high-resolution monitors, such as 4K- and 5K-resolution monitors.
  • 10 GB of available hard-disk space (cannot install on a volume that uses a case-sensitive file system or on removable flash storage devices)
  • OpenGL 3.3–capable video adapter for GPU-related functionality
  • Internet connection and registration are necessary for required software activation, validation of subscriptions, and access to online services.

 

Adobe announces Lightroom 7 (aka Classic)

At today’s ‘Max’ conference Adobe announced the latest version of Lightroom. This event provides Adobe with an opportunity to showcase new applications to the great and good of  designers, photographers, web coders, video-makers, illustrators, and developers. Many will no doubt be wondering what’s new?

The answer to above question really depends on whether you’re currently a Creative Cloud Photography subscriber or have a perpetual license for Lightroom 6. If you fall into the former group then the answer is – not a lot, at least not much in the way of new features or visible enhancements. On the other hand, if you’re in the later group you’ll now have access to all the features added after Lightroom 6 first shipped. For a detailed feature review… continue reading >

Adobe Updates Lightroom CC iOS (aka Lightroom Mobile)

The last big update to Lightroom mobile was back in July (version 2.8). This latest update brings with it new features, a new name, and a new application icon.

The background to the new name and application icon are directly linked to the release of a new desktop based application called Lightroom CC (more about same in a day or so). The official line from Adobe being a common name and logo for all clients of the Adobe Creative Cloud ecosystem. An alternative explanation might be – Adobe marketing taking the opportunity to create confusion were none previously existed. Either way, Lightroom mobile is now Lightroom CC iOS and Lightroom CC Android, where iOS and Android denote that they’re clients intended for mobile devices rather than the desktop.

So, what’s new in Lightroom CC iOS?

Organise/All Photos/Camera Roll:

  • Folders – unlike conventional Operating System folders, these are containers into which Albums can be placed (i.e. similar to Collection Sets). It’s therefore import to note that you cannot put actual photos into a folder.
  • The bottom bar that previously included the camera roll and capture button has been replaced with a blue FAB (floating action button) in Organise and All Photos.
  • Focus peaking! See in live view how your focus changes when using the manual focus.

Create Folder or and Album + Camera Roll (FAB)

In below screenshot, you can see the Organise view with All Photos shown top left and two Folders, each containing multiple albums, below

Organise

In this next screenshot, I’ve expanded one of the folders to show the individual Albums stored within it.

Album View

  • You can now jump to the top in Organise and All Photos by tapping on free space in the top bar.
  • Blue bar confirms move of Albums/Folders
  • Delete Photos from Album possible (not only remove)
  • Coming back to Grid from Loupe highlights the Photo in the Grid
  • Rejected Photos are dimmed in the Grid
  • Better visualisation of Locally Stored Albums
  • The Segment headers in Grid have an unfold for the Segment

Edit:

  • Fading slider panel when adjusting a slider while panel is overlapping the photo on iPad
  • reduced the size of the side panel on the iPad
  • Presets, Crop and Selective moved to the right bar

Search:

  • Tap on the blue bar in search now jumps back into search
  • Improved alert when leaving a search with the back button

Keywords:

  • Keywords – Add them in the Keywords section, you can also add multiple keywords at once by separating them with a comma.
  • Copy/paste keywords via ••• menu
  • Keywords can sync with Lightroom CC Desktop, but not Lightroom Classic.

Apply and Edit Keywords

General:

  • Search is now also available in the Album/Collection view — how does it feel?
  • You can now pause (and resume) sync in the Cloud panel (helpful when travelling, expensive hot spots, limited WiFi etc.)
  • Improved navigation when removing album from folder
  • Updated “Help & Support” section in the Lr menu — still work in progress
  • In order to make a set filter more visible we now have a blue line, when a filter is active
  • Scrolling to just created item in the albums view and in the albums picker
  • Change in the Sync settings: Smart Preview is now the default, for cellular usage you can choose between on/off
  • Changed “Show All” in the filter options to “No Filter” to point out the possibility of a filter reset
  • Import from iOS Files (iOS 11)
  • Export to iOS Files (iOS 11)
  • Various layout adjustments
  • Clean up: ••• menus now hide options that are not available
  • Improved speed rating experience
  • “Add photos” in album ••• includes “Files”
  • “Add photos” now possible in organize

Cloud Storage Settings and Sync Behaviour with Cellular Data