Category Archives: Masking

Camera Raw, Lightroom Classic & Desktop | April 2023

The latest updates to Camera Raw (15.3), Lightroom Classic (12.3) and Lightroom Desktop (6.3) have been released to customers. These updates include new camera and lens support along with bug fixes. There is one major new feature along with other minor features and enhancements that I’ll discuss below.

AI-powered Denoise [Camera Raw, Lightroom Classic & Desktop]

With these latest updates, Adobe is introducing AI-powered Denoise!

Using artificial intelligence, Camera Raw, Lightroom Classic and Desktop can now remove noise from your photos. Better still, the noise is removed whilst preserving fine detail, far more effectively than the legacy noise reduction controls.

At present, Denoise will only work with Bayer and X-trans raw files. It won’t work on files such as JPEG, HEIC, ProRAW, sRaw, etc. However, Adobe plan to expand support for other file types in future versions.

Lightroom Classic Denoise

Denoise Workflow and File Management

The process of denoising your photos is very simple.

First, Adobe recommend that photos are denoised before editing, especially healing and masking as they can be affected by noise. Edits such as Highlights, Shadows, Dehaze and Clarity can also look different in denoised photos.

Denoise can be accessed via Photo > Enhance menu, or via the ‘Denoise…’ button in the Detail panel (see above screenshot).

Adobe Denoise analyses each photo dynamically to find the optimum range, but the default ‘Amount’ value (50) is always halfway between least and full denoising. In other words, the meaning of ‘full denoising’ varies with the photo, based on the analysis.

In the Enhance dialog, you can press-and-hold anywhere within the preview image to see the photo without Denoise applied. This provides a simple way to make before/after comparisons, especially when fine-tuning the Amount setting.

As with previous Enhance features, any adjustments you may already have made to the original photo will automatically be carried over to the enhanced DNG, although denoising first is recommended for the reasons mentioned above. Any legacy luminance or colour noise adjustments are ignored, and set to zero in the new DNG file. You can edit the new DNG file just like any other raw photo, apply your favourite presets, etc.

The zoom level used in the Enhance Preview panel is 200%, which is a tad high for normal resolution displays but is fine for 4K and higher.

The Denoise process produces a new derivative DNG file with ‘Enhanced-NR’ appended to the filename. Making the result of Denoise into a DNG has all the advantages that normal raw files do, and is similar to other features that produce a DNG. These include, Merge to Panorama and Merge to HDR. However, in the case of Denoise, like the other Enhance features, the resulting DNG also contains a copy of the original mosaic data, so nothing is lost. That being said, Denoise can’t yet be applied on an already enhanced image (Super Resolution or Denoised).

To make the task of finding files that have had ‘Denoise’ applied, the engineering team have provided an option to automatically add keywords to ‘Enhanced’ images. This option can be found under File Handling tab in Preferences dialog as shown in screenshot below.

The new keyword is added to each file based on the enhance workflow you have selected.

  • Raw Details
  • Super Resolution
  • Denoise

A new badge    has also be added to Grid thumbnail and filmstrip. Apparently, the keywords and badges are to make Denoised file easier to find. Personally, I think the engineering time would have been more usefully spent in providing a ‘filter’.

No doubt, there will be numerous comparisons between Adobe Denoise and third party offerings such as those from DxO and Topaz. Each will have areas where they perform well and others where they perform less well. By way of example, some of the third party products may excel at removing all traces of noise without human intervention whereas Adobe’s Denoise at it’s default setting of 50 tends to leave a little residual noise. However, this should not be seen a shortcoming, especially since a small movement of the Amount slider is all that’s needed to remove the noise. Another example, Some 3rd party applications apply global sharpening whilst Adobe Denoise does not. Personally, I prefer to have some control over the amount of noise reduction and sharpening applied to photos, but other users prefer that the process be a single click.

A comprehensive explanation of Denoise written by Eric Chan from the Camera Raw team can be found here.

Masking

Masking continues to be improved with new tools and UI tweaks. I’ve highlighted some of the new features and UI tweaks below.

Curves [Lightroom Classic and Desktop]

A ‘Curves’ panel has been added to to Masks in Lightroom Classic and Desktop. This brings both versions of Lightroom into line with Camera Raw.

Other Curve enhancements include:

  • Indicators (dots) have also added to Tone Curve and Masking Curves panel to indicate if that Curve has active settings. See above screenshot.
  • Support has also been added for Renaming and Deleting Curve Presets through the UI. The option is only available for User Created Presets.
  • The Histogram shown in local curve will be displayed for the selected mask, and not of the entire image. See above screenshot.

Select People [Camera Raw, Lightroom Classic and Desktop]

Two new attributes for the People mask.

  • Facial Hair
  • Clothes

Also, the People mask attribute ‘Face Skin is now renamed to ‘Facial Skin’.

History Step [Lightroom Classic]

The Mask Name would now be added to History step when its settings, like Exposure, Contrast, etc., are changed.

Adaptive Presets [Camera Raw, Lightroom Classic and Desktop]

The Portrait Group of ‘Adaptive’ Presets has been expanded to include

  • Polished Portrait
  • Darken Beard

Library Enhancements [Lightroom Classic]

The Lightroom Classic engineering team have spent some time working to improve Scrolling and Walk Performance. However, at this time these improvements are limited to macOS systems.

For example, many Library module views now leverage native macOS capabilities for drawing/rendering of Images. This should help in optimising overall scrolling performance.

With these changes, you should experience better performance in the following views in macOS.

  • Improved / smoother Publish Grid scrolling and People View Scrolling.
  • Improved/ smoother scrolling experience in Import Grid , Import Loupe.
  • Faster walking in Full Screen.

Other Performance tweaks have been implemented as follows:

  • Keywords – optimised ‘Purge Unused Keywords’ workflow.
  • Map – the embedded browser framework that is used to render web content Classic in Map and Web modules has been updated.

UI Enhancements [Lightroom Classic]

Eyeball icons & Edit indicators

  • Eyeball icons replace the ‘switches’ and are now visible by default for all Edit panels and Healing, Redeye, and Masking tools. They can be clicked and held to temporarily hide settings of that panel. However, should you wish to switch a panel off, then press and hold Option/Alt key to convert Eyeball icons to  a Panel Switch.
  • Edit Indicators are also available in the toolbar. For the Global Panels, Eyeball icons also act as edit indicators.

Edit in Photoshop > Select Photoshop Version

Lightroom Classic now includes an option to select Photoshop version from all the different Photoshop versions installed on your system for your ‘Edit in Photoshop’ workflows. You can select the preferred Photoshop version from ‘Photoshop version’ dropdown in Preference > External Editing tab > Edit in Adobe Photoshop section. By default, latest version of Photoshop installed is selected. Once the Photoshop version is selected, it can be used for all the Edit-In Photoshop workflows.

Open as Smart Object Layers in Photoshop

A new option  has been added to open selected images as Smart Object Layers in Photoshop.

Feature Enhancements [Lightroom Desktop]

In addition to the headline feature mentioned above, Lightroom Desktop receives the following enhancements.

  • Video Improvements (Auto – B&W – Extract frame – Export frame – Trimming improvements (Timeline, Numeric in Crop))
  • Batch Editing -Already have it, just more discoverable -Copy -Paste -X to clear current settings -Gear to specify what gets copied
  • Resize Filmstrip
  • Preference to turn off Tool Tips
  • Performance Improvements: Crop, Scrolling, Pan and Zoom
  • [Beta] Content Authenticity feature via Export (opt in) -File or Cloud – Credentials to include -Verification site – https://verify.contentauthenticity.or -See list of creators, tools, what was done -See original (See original and edit side).

New Camera Support

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

New Lens Correction Support

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

Disclosure: As an Adobe Community Expert I receive a free subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud.

Camera Raw, Lightroom Classic & Desktop | June 2022

 The latest updates to Camera Raw (14.4), Lightroom Classic (11.4) and Lightroom Desktop (5.4) have been released to customers. These updates include new camera and lens support, and bug fixes. There are also new features and performance enhancements in each of the applications. I’ve summarised below what I consider to be the highlights. However, more details on new features and enhancements can be found by clicking on the ‘What’s New’ menu option in the ‘Help’ menu of each application.

Masking Updates

All three applications benefit from a number of usability enhancements to the masking feature, although as of this release, not all have made their way into Lightroom Desktop.

Mask Invert (Camera Raw, Lightroom Classic and Desktop)

With these latest updates, we now have the ability to invert a whole mask, not only a component. The command for inverting masks can be found under the three-dot menu for the mask you want to invert.

Batch Update of AI Masks (Camera Raw, Lightroom Classic and Desktop)

The ability to update ‘Subject’ and ‘Sky’ masks on multiple images at once is now supported.

  • An option for ‘Update All’ masks has been added in the Masking panel. This can be accessed by opening the Masking panel on an image which has missing masks.
  • Also, for the images with missing masks, we can select all of the images, then use ‘Settings > Update AI Masks’ option in the Develop module to update Subject/Sky masks.
  • An indicator will be shown under Histogram in Develop Module when the current image has any AI Masks missing.

The following lists the supported and unsupported workflows available when batch updating images with AI masks.

Supported workflows:

  • Copy and Paste
  • Auto Sync Settings
  • Previous (in the Develop module)
  • Sync settings
  • Presets

Unsupported workflows:

  • Applying Develop Preset during Import
  • Raw Default

In both these cases, the ‘Update AI Masks’ on the imported images can be used to update the masks.

Mask Amount Slider (Camera Raw and Lightroom Classic)

Masks has been revamped to include an amount slider at the top of the Mask adjustment panel, above the other edit sliders. An important caveat regarding the Amount slider is that it does not change/update the individual sliders. Instead, it increases/reduces the intensity of the effect applied in the background. It’s also important to note that whilst an image that has been edited using the Mask Amount slider will share the same appearance as Camera Raw 14.4 and Lightroom Classic 11.4 when viewed in earlier versions, the slider itself will not be available.

Masking Badges (Camera Raw, Lightroom Classic and Desktop)

A number of mask badges in the Masking Panel have been changed to make them more visible and their function more obvious. Badges have been positioned on the far left side of the masking panel to denote the operations for: Add, Subtract, Intersect and Invert. The badges to denote the mask type have been placed to the right of the operator badges.

Presets (Camera Raw, Lightroom Classic and Desktop)

New Premium and Adaptive Presets

For those who use presets to enhance or personalise their images, Adobe have included 50 new Premium presets designed for videos, portraits and live concert photos. There are also  two sets of  ‘Adaptive Presets’, which with a single click will select the ‘Sky’ to create dramatic skies or ‘Subject’ to make your subject pop. All of the presets also include ‘live’ on-screen updates. So, we can just hover the  mouse over the presets to see a preview of the preset at work.

Preset Amount Slider

And if the new presets aren’t enough, an ‘Amount’ slider has been added to enable global fine-tuning of the preset settings.

For presets that support ‘amount’, the slider is enabled and defaults to value of 100. The minimum and maximum values of the slider are 0 and 200, respectively. The slider will be enabled for most Adobe-created presets including Premium Presets. However, the slider is only enabled for presets created in earlier versions if they have scalable settings. What are scalable settings?

Scalable settings:

  • White Balance (temperature & tint)
  • Exposure
  • Contrast
  • Highlights
  • Shadows
  • Whites
  • Blacks
  • Texture
  • Clarity
  • Dehaze
  • Curves (all curves)
  • Detail (sharpening amount, luminance noise reduction amount, color noise reduction amount)
  • Color Mixer (all sliders)
  • Color Grading (hue, saturation and luminance adjustments)
  • Effects (grain & vignette amount)

Non-scalable settings:

  • Camera Profiles (e.g. Adobe Color)
  • Convert to black-and-white
  • Detail (non-amount sliders, such as the Radius and Masking sliders)
  • Color Grading: Blending, Balance
  • Lens Corrections (LrC) / Optics (ACR)
  • Geometry
  • Effects (non-amount sliders, such as Size and Roughness of grain)
  • Calibration
  • Red-eye
  • Heal and Clone
  • Masking
  • Crop

The New and Update Preset dialog includes a new checkbox to indicate whether a preset should or should not support the ‘Amount’ slider. In Preset dialog, when the currently selected settings are scalable, then the Support Amount Slider checkbox will be enabled and checked by default. Otherwise, the checkbox will be disabled and unchecked.

Export (Lightroom Classic)

Lightroom Classic can now take advantage of the GPU when exporting images. However, as with GPU acceleration in Camera Raw, there are caveats as to whether a computer will be able to take advantage of the GPU when exporting. These caveats are related to the amount and type of memory available to the GPU:

  • If the GPU has dedicated VRAM of 8 GB and above, ‘Export’ will automatically utilise the GPU.
  • If the GPU has dedicated VRAM less than 8GB, you can enable GPU for ‘Export’ using ‘Custom’ option in ‘Use Graphic Processor’ located in Performance tab of Preference dialog. However, you are unlikely to see much, if any, improvement in export times. 
  • If the GPU uses shared memory (e.g. integrated graphic cards or Apple M1 unified memory), then the minimum requirement for export automatically taking advantage of the GPU is 16GB. Again, whilst it’s possible to force GPU support on computers with less shared memory, the improvement in export times will be small, and will require that the system makes significant use of swaps to disk/ssd.

I’ve included a screenshot below that shows the various options available for enabling GPU export support. Note that with only 4GB of VRAM on this particular computer, the GPU only supports limited acceleration, which means that acceleration will be minimal, if any.

You may well be asking what GPU acceleration on for exporting bulk images actually delivers.  I’ve used three Mac M1 based systems to demonstrate. The three Macs used were:

  • Mac mini 8-core M1 with 8-core GPU, 1TB internal SSD and 16GB of unified memory;
  • 16-inch MacBook Pro 10-core M1 Pro with 16-core GPU, 2 TB internal SSD and 32GB of unified memory; and
  • Mac Studio 20-core M1 Ultra with 48-core GPU, 1TB internal SSD and 64GB of unified memory.

I imported 1000 Canon EOS R5 files into Lightroom Classic 11.4, applied lens corrections, Auto Settings in the Basic panel and default sharpening. The Export settings panel was configured for full size, Quality ’100%’ JPEG and Standard sharpening. A 2TB Samsung T5 USB-C SSD was used for the original and saved files. Using the T5 meant that the likelihood of the faster SSDs in the M1 Pro and Ultra helping the  SSD read / write times would not occur.

The averaged results from 3 tests on each computer are shown graphically below.

As above shows, with GPU acceleration enabled on computers meeting the specified memory requirements, we can expect to see significant reductions in export times. In April, I published a Blog post using Camera Raw 14.3 comparing various M1 based Mac computers with an Intel based MacBook Pro here. This post provides more details on the approach I adopted in the above tests.

Note: the times shown in above graph are for Canon EOS R5 files. The export times for other camera models and vendors are very likely to differ.

Discarding Stale or Orphaned Previews (Lightroom Classic)

Preview Management has received some attention in this version by optimising the algorithms used to identify stale and orphaned previews. With this change, LrC delete all the orphaned previews (previews of images that are removed from catalog or no longer exist) and stale previews (previews which are no longer in use) from <Catalog Name> Previews.lrdata.

Crop and Info Overlays (Lightroom Classic)

Lightroom Classic now includes a ‘Crop Overlay’ for ‘Fifths’ in the Develop module (Tools > Crop Guide Overlay > Fifths). Additionally, we can now choose to have different ‘Info Overlays’ in Library and Develop modules.

In-App Feedback & Ai Red Eye Removal (Lightroom Desktop)

In-App Feedback for Machine Learning features is available using the AI Red Eye Removal, Select Subject, or Select Sky. With this feature, you now have the option to provide feedback on the results of the AI process. An icon resembling a cartoon dialog bubble now appears in the interface when using one of these features, allowing you to provide feedback on the AI’s performance.

Compare View (Lightroom Desktop)

Lightroom Desktop now includes a Compare View with an option to place images side-by-side or stacked. The images can also be swapped.

Video (Lightroom Desktop)

You no longer need to leave Lightroom Desktop if you wish to make an edit to a video before sharing it on social media or elsewhere. Many of the Camera Raw edit controls that you are accustomed to using with your photos can also be used to edit your videos. You can also trim a video clip, altering its in-point and/or out-point to cut off any part of the beginning and/or end that you don’t want.

Batch Auto Settings (Lightroom Desktop)

You can now apply Auto Settings to any number of photos at once. Simply, select multiple photos in the grid, then invoke the command via the Photos menu or via the contextual menu.

New Camera Support

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

New Lens Correction Support

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

Bug Fixes

Lightroom Classic bug fixes listed here

Lightroom Desktop bug fixes listed here

Camera Raw bug fixes listed here

Disclosure: As an Adobe Community Expert I receive a free subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud.

Camera Raw, Lightroom Classic & Desktop | February 2022

 The latest updates to Lightroom Classic (11.2), Lightroom Desktop (5.2) and Camera Raw (14.2) were released to customers today (7 February). These updates include new camera and lens support plus bug fixes. There are also some performance enhancements to the Lightroom Classic Library module, tweaks to masking and some helpful enhancements to existing features in Lightroom Desktop.

Lightroom Desktop

Lightroom Classic

Multitasking in Library Module

With this release, Adobe have extended multitasking to Folder/Collection search and Library Metadata Filters. With this change, catalog read operations are unblocked for Folder/Collection search and Library Metadata Filters. In earlier versions these operations were sequential and thus blocked other catalog operations.

A useful example of where above will prove beneficial is when you apply a Develop preset using Quick Develop panel to a large set of images and also want to search different folders/collection or use metadata filters. Both operations can now be done simultaneously, unlike previous versions of LrC versions, where you had to wait for the first operation to complete before the second could be started.

Masking Enhancements

Adobe have added the following enhancements to the Masking panel.

  • The position of Masking Panel is remembered throughout the session, and it can also be moved to secondary monitor.
  • All components in a mask can be moved together without holding the Ctrl/Cmd key. However, the ‘mask’ should be selected, and not an individual component while this operation is being performed. This enhancement is applicable only to brush, linear gradient, and radial gradient masks
  • The Masking Panel can opened or closed using Shift+W

Photoshop Elements 2022

With this release, you can import a Photoshop Elements 2022 catalog into Lightroom Classic.

Lightroom Desktop

Lightroom Desktop receives the following enhancements.

  • Masking – Intersect Masking Option
  • Export Short Side – When exporting using custom dimensions, you can now choose to specify the dimension of the Short Side rather than the Long Side.
  • Version Export – Versions can be exported from the Versions panel both individually and all in a batch. This can be done with both Named Versions and Auto Versions.

New Camera Support

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

New Lens Correction Support

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

Bug Fixes

Lightroom Classic bug fixes listed here

Lightroom Desktop bug fixes listed here

Camera Raw bug fixes listed here

Disclosure: As an Adobe Community Expert I receive a free subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud