Category Archives: Adobe Photoshop Lightroom

Adobe Lightroom 7.3 and Camera Raw 10.3 | April 2018

Adobe has just released the April 2018 update to Lightroom Classic CC, Lightroom CC Desktop and Adobe Camera Raw (ACR). The headline new feature being improved ‘Camera Profiles’ or as Adobe now prefer to call them ‘Profiles’.

Lightroom and ACR have supported camera profiles since the products were first introduced. However, in the early days these were quite primitive and of limited use when editing photos. As Lightroom and ACR have developed the range of Camera Profiles has expanded. They also allowed customers to change how the raw data was processed, thus enabling them to control the image’s tonality and colour independently of slider adjustments. For example, camera profiles created using the X-rite ColorChecker Passport include mild hue/saturation shifts to warm or cool images.

While many advanced users and educators have long known about the power of camera profiles, the profiles were hidden deep within the Camera Calibration section. In this update, Adobe have moved the profiles to the top of the Basic panel and through a new ‘Profile Browser’ significantly improved access and usability.

Lightroom Classic Develop module – New Profile Browser

The new Profile Browser is common to Lightroom Classic CC, Lightroom CC Desktop and ACR, and function nearly* identically in each. The Profile Browser (button to the right of the pull-down) lets you pick a profile via a thumbnail. A nice feature of this being the ability to preview the effect in the main content area by hovering your mouse over the the profile thumbnail. You then click on the profile to apply it to the selected image or images. I’ve include a short demonstration video here.

There is also a ‘List’ view, which takes up less of the application interface, and in my view makes it easier to preview how each profile effects the image. Again, like the Grid view, hovering over the profile name will allow you to preview the effect. This short video demonstrates ‘List’ view

The Profile Browser also allows you to create favourites. To make a profile into a favourite, click on the the star at top right corner of thumbnail in Grid view or profile name in List view.

Profile Browser – ‘List’ view

New Adobe Raw Camera Profiles

In addition to the Adobe Standard profile, Adobe have developed a range of new and additional camera profiles specifically for raw files. These new profiles provide alternative starting points for raw images, and are intended to expand your raw processing workflow. The new profiles are:

  • Adobe Color: This is the new default profile for all raw images, and is automatically applied to newly imported raw images that haven’t been previously edited. Adobe Color is similar to Adobe Standard in that it was designed to provide a good balance of contrast and saturation for any image. However, compared to Adobe Standard, Adobe Color is slightly more contrasty and saturated, and some of the colours have been tweaked to be more natural and pleasing.
  • Adobe Monochrome: This is the Yin to the Adobe Color Yang. Adobe Monochrome is a new profile designed to create the best starting point for black and white images. When you convert to Black and White mode, Adobe Monochrome profile will automatically be selected. When you select Adobe Monochrome profile, the application will automatically switch into Black and White mode.
  • Adobe Neutral: This profile is designed to give you the most headroom for post processing by reducing contrast and colour boosts as much as possible. The images resulting from this profile tend to be quiet flat in appearance. However, this profile may be a great place to start for images with very tricky colours and gradients.
  • Adobe Vivid: On the other end of the spectrum from Adobe Neutral, Adobe Vivid is designed to look great right out of the box, requiring as little tweaking as possible.
  • Adobe Portrait: This profile is designed especially for portrait images by expanding the colour resolution of skin tones, which helps ensure better colour and tonality of portraits of people of all skin tones.
  • Adobe Landscape: This profile is tailored for landscape images by focusing on colours and tonalities typically found in landscapes.

Camera Matching Profiles

Camera Matching Profiles have been in Lightroom and ACR for some time. However, given their location (i.e. Camera Calibration panel) they weren’t particularly easy to find.

Camera Matching Profiles were originally created with the intention of matching the different ‘look’s and ‘recipes’ supported by camera vendors such as Canon, Leica, Nikon, Olympus, Panasonic, Pentax and Sony. These profiles made it possible for you to match the colour and tonality of the images displayed on the cameras rear LCD screen.

Creative Profiles

Creative Profiles are a new concept to Lightroom and ACR. They work on any file type, from Raw files to JPEGs and TIFFs, and are designed to create a certain style or effect. Creative Profiles can now take advantage of 3D Look Up Tables (LUTs) and can also apply nearly any of the effects that are possible within Lightroom or ACR.

An intensity slider is provided for Creative Profiles, thus allowing you to tailor the creative effect to taste. This slider is not available for either the Adobe Profiles or Camera Profiles.

Creative Profiles are grouped together in a few separate groups:

  • Modern: these profiles are designed to create unique effects that fit in with current photography styles.
  • Vintage: profiles are designed to replicate the film based effects.
  • Artistic: profiles are designed to be more edgy, with stronger colour shifts.
  • Black and White (B&W): profiles are designed to optimise tonality shifts needed for high impact black and white work.

How are creative profiles different from presets?

Conceptually, presets and profiles are very similar – you select a preset or a profile, and the image changes. Even under the hood, they’re similar in that applying either a preset or a profile can change the same types of enhancements. For example, both a preset and a profile could say change the exposure slider to -1EV. However, for all their similarities they are different.

The key differences are:

Presets:

  • Slider changes are visible.
  • Slider changes override anything that’s already been done. For example, if you move the Exposure slider to +1, then apply a preset that contains Exposure=0, your image will have the Exposure slider set to 0. In other words, the +1 exposure adjustment is cancelled out.
  • Can set a profile. That is, a profile is like any other value in the develop panel, meaning you can set a profile and then store that setting within a preset.

Profiles:

  • Don’t move sliders.
  • Can be applied on top of a set of existing edits without changing the sliders. Since the slider values don’t change and are not overwritten, you can modify your image as you like and then apply a profile on top of your edited image (see below B&W example).
  • Profiles *may* contain a 3D LUT, which can do enhancements not possible with any of the sliders found in the Develop module.
  • Every image must have a profile and can only have one profile at a time. Changing from Adobe Standard to B&W 01 will mean that B&W 01 is being applied to your image, no longer Adobe Standard.

In this example, I took a previously edited colour version of an image and applied the B&W 05 profile, then reduced the effect to taste using the amount slider. Note that this slider is not available for either the Adobe Raw Profiles or Camera Matching Profiles.

Pre-edited Colour Image

 

B&W 05 Profile with amount reduced to 60%

Given the advantages of creative profiles over presets I expect many existing commercial presets will eventually be converted to profiles.

Profile Management

One aspect of the new Profile Browser that I suspect will irritate some customers is the number of profiles that ship with this update. In some instances, especially when customers already have a selection of custom camera profiles, the number of profiles to choose from may be overwhelming. Unfortunately, neither Lightroom Classic CC or Lightroom CC Desktop currently provide any form of profile management. However, as  I mentioned above*, while the Profile Browser functions near identically in Lightroom Classic, Lightroom CC Desktop and ACR there is additional functionality in ACR. This being the ability to hide/show profile sets and/or individual profiles. Furthermore, any profile sets or profiles that you choose to hide in ACR will also be hidden in Lightroom Classic CC. Unfortunately, this feature doesn’t yet extend to Lightroom CC Desktop.

Adobe Camera Raw – Profile Management

3rd Party Profiles and Develop Presets

Adobe has also worked closely with a number of 3rd party preset makers to help them create new profiles and presets compatible with Lr7.3. These should be available shortly after this Lr/ACR update is released.

DCP profiles (such as those created by XRite Passport, the Adobe DNG Profile Creator, as well as 3rd parties like VSCO, RNI, etc.) will all need to go into the user profile location:

  • Mac:  /Users/[your username]/Library/Application Support/Adobe/ CameraRaw/ CameraProfiles/
  • Windows: C: \Users\[your username]\AppData\ Roaming\Adobe\CameraRaw\ CameraProfiles\

Presets will all need to go into the user preset location:

  • Mac: /Users/[your username]/Library/Application\Support/Adobe/CameraRaw/Settings
  • Windows: C:\Users\[your username]\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\CameraRaw\Settings

Further information on the differences between and how to use the new profiles can be seen in these videos prepared by Julieanne Kost of Adobe.

Other new features and changes in Lightroom Classic include:

Develop Presets

Develop  Presets created in Lightroom are now useable in Camera Raw, and vice versa. To support this change, any existing ‘Lua’ based presets you may have created in previous versions of Lightroom will be converted to ‘XMP’ based profiles when the 7.3 update is first launched. Some third party or commercial presets, particularly those with embedded effects not possible in Lightroom/ACR  will need to be updated by the vendor.

Face Recognition

The underlying Face Tagging engine in Lightroom Classic has also been updated. This provides much improved face detection and face recognition. In particular, false positives have been greatly reduced.

A new checkbox has been added to allow you to retain all manually confirmed faces (i.e confirmed named faces or manually drawn faces) when opting for ‘Find Faces Again’. The default is to keep all manually confirmed faces and not re-index these photos again.

Recommended steps to upgrade the face records

  1. In Library module, select All Photographs in the Catalog panel.
  2. Select all photos in the Grid view or the Filmstrip. To select all photos, choose Edit > Select All or press Ctrl+A (Windows) or Command+A (macOS).
  3. From the menu bar, choose Library > Find Faces Again.
  4. In the Find Faces Again dialog, ensure that the following options are selected.
  • Skip Over Photos That Have Not Been Previously Indexed
  • Skip Over Photos With Manually Confirmed Faces

5. Click Confirm.

Lightroom Classic will now re-run face detection to upgrade the existing face records but excludes photos that have never had face detection run before. Any photos that have at least one confirmed face or at least one manually drawn face region are also excluded to preserve your previous edits; the unconfirmed faces is those photos remain unconfirmed.

Tone Curve – Scaled Up

  • The Tone Curve has been scaled up, i.e., made bigger, to enable finer control of tone curve adjustments.
  • The opacity of the RGB, Red, Green & Blue tone curve graphs has also been increased, so that it looks a bit brighter. This means that the range of values to which the adjustment is being made is much easier to distinguish on the histogram.

Expanded Tone Curve

Dehaze moved to Basic Panel

The Dehaze slider has been moved from Effects to the Basic Panel. Also, you’ll find ‘Dehaze’ under ‘Basic Tone’ in the reorganised ‘Copy Settings’ and ‘Preset’ creation dialogs in both Lightroom Classic CC and ACR.

Dehaze Slider in Basic Panel

Lightroom Classic CC – Updated ‘Create Develop Preset’ Panel

Facebook Plugin

The Facebook Plugin APIs have been updated. There should be no adverse impact from this change when publishing your images to Facebook. However, it should be noted that ‘comments’ are no longer supported.

Sharpening

The default for sharpening amount has been increased from 25 to 40. This new sharpening    amount will be applied automatically to newly imported images or when edits to existing images are are reset. The sharpening amount increase, in conjunction with the new Adobe Color default profile, are part of an effort to offer a more pleasing “out-of-the-box” rendering for Lr Classic, Lr CC, & ACR.

Other new features in Lightroom CC Desktop include:

  • Support for Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices
  • Filter by Sync Status

New Camera and Lens Support

  • Canon EOS 1500D (EOS Rebel T7/EOS Kiss X90/EOS 2000D)
  • Canon 3000D (EOS Rebel T100/EOS 4000D)
  • Canon EOS M50 (EOS Kiss M)
  • Panasonic LUMIX DC-GX9 (DC-GX7MK3)
  • Panasonic LUMIX ZS200 (DC-TX2/DC-TZ200/DC-TZ202/DC-TZ220/DC-ZS220)
  • Sony A7 III (ILCE-7M3)

Details on Camera and Lens support can be found at Camera Raw Support

 

Adobe Lightroom Classic 7.2 | February 2018

Lightroom 7.2 was released today. This release is primarily about performance improvements and bug fixes although there a few minor but useful feature enhancements.

Lightroom 7.2 – Library Module

Performance Improvements

Adobe are advising that you should see significant performance improvements on most computers with multiple cores. These be most noticeable on more powerful computers, especially those with six and more CPU core. However, to take advantage of the improvements you will also need at least 12 GB RAM. That being said, computers with fewer CPU cores (e.g. laptops) and more than 12 GB RAM will also see some improvement. To reflect this, Adobe have updated the system requirements to recommend 12GB of RAM, although it will still run with 4GB.

Aspects of the application where Adobe claim customers should see improved performance include:

  • Import and preview generation
  • Walking of images in the Loupe View
  • Rendering of adjustments in Develop
  • Batch merge operations of HDR/Panos
  • Export

By this point you may be thinking that Adobe have made similar claims in the past but when put to the test customers were left somewhat underwhelmed. So, what’s different this time? Well, rather than make an unsubstantiated claim Adobe gave some independent   Photo Blogs and test houses early access to 7.2. You can read more about their experiences and findings at: Fstoppers, Puget Systems, and DPReview.

In addition to above improvements Adobe have also advised that a long term and extremely frustrating bug affecting a relatively small number of customers. This bug manifested itself as an extreme slowdown over time. In some cases the application became so unresponsive that it had to be relaunched.

NEW FEATURES

Folder Search

It’s been a while coming but now you can search folder names. It operates much like collection searches by filtering the list of relevant folders down to only those matching the search criteria. It’s particular useful if you tend to use descriptive or topical names for folders. In below example, I’ve searched for folders continuing ‘yellowstone’.

Lightroom 7.2 – Folder Search

‘Folder Search’ also works well with folders containing numbers or a mix of numbers and letters. For example, date based folder names.

Favorite Folders

Another new folder related features is ‘Favorite Folders’. Using this this feature you can mark one or more folders as favorites by right-mouse clicking on the folder name then selecting ‘Mark Favorite’.

Lightroom 7.2 – Favorite Folder

You can also use the filter in ‘Folder Search’ to show only those folders marked as favorites. In below example, I’ve marked only the “Yellowstone” folders containing raw files as favorites.

Lightroom 7.2 – Filter Favorite Folders

Create a Collection from a Folder

Another  new feature associated with folders is the ability to create a collection or collection hierarchy from a folder or folder hierarchy. To access the feature you simply right-mouse click on the folder or parent folder and select ‘Create Collection’ or ‘Collection Sets’, respectively.

Lightroom 7.2 – Create Collection from Folder

Filter Edited/Unedited Photos

The last new feature I want to discuss is the ‘Edited/Unedited’ buttons on the ‘Library Filter Attributes Bar’. Using these buttons you can filter on photos that have already been edited or are still to be edited.

Lightroom 7.2 – Library Filter Attribute Bar

Above buttons are duplicated in the ‘Filmstrip Filter Bar’.  The ‘Edit’ option can also be found in the ‘Metadata Filter’ panel and ‘Smart Collections’. At this point it’s worth noting that the existing Smart Collection ‘Has Adjustments’ criteria does not include cropping whereas ‘Has Edits’ does include cropping.

Lightroom 7.2 – Smart Collections

Create Collections from a Pin in the Map Module

You can now add all of the photos from a specific location to a Collection.  Simply right-mouse click on any pin or group of pins on the Map and choose ‘Create Collection’.

Lightroom 7.2 – Map Module – Create Collection

Camera and Lens Support

You can also check out the latest camera and lens profile support as well.

Lightroom CC Ecosystem

Today also sees the release of minor updates to Lightroom CC Desktop, iOS and Android. More details of what’s, bug fixes, etc can be found at the Adobe Lightroom CC Blog

Adobe updates Lightroom CC Ecosystem and Lightroom Classic | December 2017


Adobe has announced updates to the entire Lightroom CC ecosystem as well as updates to Lightroom Classic and Camera Raw.

In addition to the new features described below these updates include important bug fixes, and support for recently released cameras and lenses.

New Auto Settings, powered by Adobe Sensei

‘Auto’ has been completely reworked to create better results. Using an advanced neural network powered by Adobe Sensei, the new Auto Settings is said to produce a better photo. It does so by analysing your photo and comparing it to tens of thousands of professionally edited photos to create more pleasing images.

Lightroom Classic – Example of new Auto in action

In above example, the new auto technology has determined that Vibrance and Saturation has been applied in addition to basic tonal adjustments.

Lightroom Classic – Auto

Whether applying these colour oriented adjustments automatically will be well received is no doubt a question Adobe will be looking for feedback on. Personally, I’ve not found either to be too far from those that I would normally set myself, and am generally happy with their inclusion. Likewise, I’ve found the tone corrections the new auto applies to be very good in all but a two areas (i.e. skin tones and backlit images).

In addition to Lightroom Classic, the new Auto is available ecosystem wide, including in Lightroom CC, Lightroom CC for iOS, Lightroom CC for Android, Lightroom CC on the web, and Adobe Camera Raw (ACR).

Lightroom Classic and Adobe Camera Raw

Adobe has also made a refinement to the Colour Range Masking tool in Lightroom Classic and Camera Raw. Based on customer feedback, they’ve made it easier to remove individual sample points. You can do this by holding down the Alt (Win) or Option (Mac) key while using your mouse to select the sample point.

Additional Performance Improvements

Customers who have their cameras set to save compressed raw files might notice a speed-up in rendering previews from a new set of imported images. You may also see improvement in on-screen interactive adjustments and import/export/merge processes.

Lightroom CC on Desktop

When I published my brief overview of Lightroom CC on Desktop back in October, I mentioned that some important editing tools were missing. With this latest update two of the missing features have been added.

Tone Curve

The Tone Curve is a very popular tools used by photographers to provide advanced control over the tonality, contrast, and colour balance of an image. However, as initial adopters of Lightroom CC on Desktop quickly realised it was absent. This was a strange omission, especially since the feature has existed in the iOS and Android versions for some time now. The good news for customers who missed it is that it’s now available on the CC desktop application.

Lightroom CC on Desktop – Tone Curve

You can use either the Parametric Curve or the Point Curve modes to tune the tonality and contrast of the image. Additionally and like Lightroom Classic, you can also adjust the Red, Green, and Blue modes to modify the colour balance of the image. The Tone Curve lives next to the Auto button in the Light panel.

Split Toning

Split Toning allows you to stylise your photo through colour tints in the highlights and shadows of your image. You can use the Split Toning tool to simulate traditional black and white tints and toners like sepia or selenium toners, simulate printing on coloured paper, or create a modern stylization on colour images. Split Toning lives in the Effects panel.

Lightroom CC on Desktop – Split Tone Adjustments

Change Capture Time

Lightroom CC now lets you to adjust the capture time, for both single photos as well as a set of photos. Typically, this feature will only be used when you forgot to change your camera’s time or time zone settings.

Lightroom CC on Desktop – Capture Time Editor

To use the Capture Time editor, select a photo (or series of photos) and use the pencil icon in the Info panel to change capture time. Lightroom CC will update the capture date, and  your photos will now show up on the right date and time in the organise view.

Full Screen View

I suspect I’m in a minority when it comes to full screen view as I  have no love for same in any application. That being said, many customers find it useful, and made their feelings known soon after Lightroom CC on Desktop was launched.  Obviously, Adobe heard the complaints and full screen view is now supported. To view your photos in full screen, you can use either the F key or navigate to View-> Detail Full Screen.

Android

In addition to the new Auto settings described above, Adobe added the following to Lightroom CC on Android:

  • App Shortcuts — For Android Nougat and later devices, tap and hold on the app icon to quickly launch the app into popular modes.
  • More control for managing storage.
  • Resolved an issue that prevented some Huawei customers from importing images.
  • Resolved an issue that caused a crash for some Pixel 2 customers on export.
  • Resolved a problem that prevented some Samsung customers from installing the previous version.Bug fixes and speed improvements.

iOS

In addition to the new Auto settings described above, Adobe added the following to Lightroom CC on iOS:

  • Watermarking on export. You can now create and customise a text based watermark for use when exporting your image from Lightroom CC on iOS.
  • Improved quality to HDR capturing.
  • Layout optimized for iPhone X.
  • Bug fixes and speed improvements.

More details on the December updates to the Lightroom CC Ecosystem can be found on the Adobe Lightroom Blog page.