With these latest  updates, Adobe has introduced new masking options for ‘background’, ‘objects’ and ‘people’. The existing Masking UI has also been updated to incorporate these new masks.

New Mask UI

When a photo contains people, the Masking panel will automatically find those people and display a mask for each. Clicking on each individual mask will allow you to refine the mask further based on their physical attributes.

People Selection

You can also add more than one person (if present in original image) by clicking on the Add People icon. A Mask will be created based on the number of People and attributes selected.

A Content-Aware removal  tool is now available under Healing tools. This new tool is based on the Patch Match technology recently introduced to Photoshop.

To use, simply brush over the area to be removed and AI will be used to find a suitable source. However,  in the event that the source does not produce a satisfactory result, then a User Guided Source Selection for Content Aware Heal tool is available. To use, hold down the Ctrl/Cmd key and drag over a new source area.

While the Content Aware removal tools appears to be the the ideal solution for removal of objects, people, etc from photos, it not perfect and occasionally the original spot heal tool does a better job.

Adaptive presets with support for new AI masks have been added to allow users to quickly make people related selections without accessing the ‘Masking’ panel. These adaptive presets will help users Enhance attributes of a Person like Hair, Teeth etc. with a single click using the power of AI.

A new interface preference has been added to Lightroom Classic. Using this preference, it’s now possible to globally Swap Left and Right Panel groups. There is also an option for only switching the Develop module panel. It is hoped that these options will make LrC UI a bit friendlier for Left Handed users.

Note that an app-relaunch is required for this change to take effect.

On Windows platform, when importing from portable devices, like iPhone, Android phone, Camera, LrC will now scan devices almost 3X faster to load and display images in the Import Grid view.

In addition to performance improvements, this workflow is expected to be much more from reliable at eliminating intermittent hangs and crashes.

With version 12, Parent folders can be displayed in the Folder panel for newly imported images instead of being hidden as in LrC 11.5 or earlier. The intent being to  help the users to organise their images better. An additional option ‘Show parent folder during import’ is now present in the ‘Import’ options section in General tab of the Preferences dialog to provide control to turn this behaviour On/Off.

Folder Panel – Show parent folder during import

Camera Raw already has existing high dynamic range-related features such as Merge to HDR. Those existing features involve reading existing HDR files, or merging multiple source files to create a new HDR file. However, in previous Camera Raw releases, the rendering results (i.e., seeing the edited photos on a display or exporting them to JPEGs or PNGs) have always been limited to standard dynamic range (SDR). For instance, the final 8-bit pixel values are always limited to 0 to 255.

Camera Raw 15 HDR Output provides the ability to see HDR renderings on compatible HDR displays, the ability to save HDR renderings to files, and the ability to send HDR results to Photoshop. At the technical level, this means the ability to produce pixel values outside of the usual [0,255] range.

Note that High Dynamic Range Output is only available on macOS.

System requirements:

• macOS 10.15 or later
• Compatible HDR display, such as MacBook Pro 14″ or 16″ (November 2021) with XDR display, or Apple Pro Display XDR
• GPU Basic or Full acceleration enabled

To enable/disable the feature

Go to the Camera Raw Preferences dialog, Technology Previews section. Enable/disable the checkbox, click OK, and restart the host app (Photoshop or Bridge).

Mask Amount Slider (Lightroom Desktop)

This slider becomes live when the user selects a Mask. Adjusting this slider adjusts non-0 sliders in-sync (under the hood). Note that these slider changes are not reflected in the Local Edit Stack UI, which is expected behaviour.

Edit In Compare View (Lightroom Desktop)

Both windows in Compare View now support editing.

System Requirement

The minimum OS version for Camera Raw, Lightroom Classic and Desktop is:

macOS

• The minimum macOS version supported is macOS Big Sur (11.0).
• You will not be able to install Lightroom Classic 12.0 or later builds on macOS Catalina (10.15.x).
• If you are using macOS Catalina (10.15.x), we recommend that you update your OS to at least macOS Big Sur (11.0).

Windows

• The minimum Windows 10 version supported would v20H2 (or later).
• You will not be able to install Lightroom Classic 12.0 or later builds on Windows 10 v1909 and v2004. Installation would be allowed on Windows Server 2016 or later.
• If you are using Windows 10 v1909 or v2004, we recommend that you update your OS to at least Windows v20H2.

Details of new camera support added since the last release can be found here