Wouldn’t you know it, predictably, Adobe has updated Lightroom Classic CC and Photoshop CC with a slew of new features right after I released the 8th Edition of my new the e-book, A Professional Photographer’s Workflow: Using Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop. As updating my e-book would take considerable time, instead I will here run through the new features and how the software has changed–and also include a few videos from Adobe that explain the new features quite well.
The YouTube video from Julieanne Kost (shown below) gives a very good overview of the new features including updated remove tools, automatic dust removal, Point Color Variance, Enhanced Masking and other great new features.
In even bigger news, Lightroom will now have assisted culling and auto-stacking of images in the latest beta versions–available on the Creative Cloud. Below is another video by Julieanne Kost showing some of the capabilities of these new features.
I have to say that the culling option is extremely limited to portraits and will not be useful for a huge swath of images. This makes that feature (at the moment) not that useful unless you are primarily a portrait photographer. I can see the auto-stacking feature being much more useful for those that use stacking. For myself, I don’t use the stacking options in Lightroom so I probably won’t use this new option either.
ASSISTED CULLING
As I indicated above, the assisted culling is fairly limited in the type of images it is designed to cull. From the examples given in the above videos, it was clear that the culling is designed for portraits. To test it out I selected a variety of portraits from an assignment with some whitewater kayakers and set both the Subject Focus and Eye Focus sliders to 80 to see just how well it would do (as shown below). Amazingly, it chose the same images I had chosen when I previously went through this same set of images–so that is quite promising.
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Of course, because the culling here is limited to a certain type of images it is not that useful for anything other than portraits. I hope that the AI culling feature in Lightroom improves rapidly and will be updated to work with all types of images, not just portraits. It would be great if Adobe can use AI to cull any and all types of images without any check boxes needing to be selected. That would be easier, and more useful, if and only if the AI software can actually differentiate which images are superior.
NEW ADOBE ACR SIDECAR FILES
One of the new features that seems a bit redundant are the new sidecar files for raw images files. If you apply Denosie AI or some of the other AI features in Lightroom, the software will now output not just the XMP file but a second ACR file for those additional adjustments. As someone who has been exporting XMP files for years, I don’t see the need for this second file to be exported and would have preferred that Lightroom just keep using the XMP system as it has been. This new file type just leads to a bigger mess of files in the original file folder.
AUTO DUST REMOVAL
The new auto dust removal sounds like a good idea but I will need to do further testing to see how well it works. As someone who regularly cleans my camera sensors to make sure there are few if any dust spots to worry about this isn’t a big issue I face when working up images. If you really need this feature then it is a serious warning sign that you need to clean your sensor, which is not that difficult.
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In the image above, which is an old image of mine created with a now Ancient Nikon D2x, there were a lot of dust spots. I clicked on the check box next to “Apply” down in the Dust removal section of the Distraction Removal dialog and voila, Lightroom found quite a few more dust soots that I could even find. Many of the dust spots it removed were incredibly small.
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In this second example (shown above) I ran the Auto Dust removal and it found all of the debris floating in the river and removed that. Interestingly it did not remove everything and left some of the floating debris in the river. Hence, as with any automatic tools, the auto Dust removal can be very powerful but you will still need to zoom into your image and check to see what it did and decide if the tool did what you wanted to do or not.
POINT COLOR VARIANCE TOOL
It is great to see a new tool, the Point Color Variance tool, added to Lightroom’s local adjustments HUD. This new tool has a variety of uses, but primarily (as shown in the video above) will be a great way to adjust skin tones and the gradation of skin tone colors in portraits. As shown below, I tried this out on a portrait. In this image, Amy doesn’t really need any adjustments to her skin but just as an example here I first made a mask of her facial skin and then used the eye dropper to select a point on her skin that seemed to be a middle ground between the brightest and the darkest areas. I then moved the Variance slider (highlighted in red) to -52. This effectively compressed the range of colors on her face and smoothed out the tones.
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In this before and after images (shown below) you can see that the skin tones were compressed ever so slightly. If you look at her nose you can see in the before image on the left that there are a bit more red tones than there are in the after image on the right. It was a cold afternoon while we were out rock climbing, but even so, I am not sure I would apply this to her skin tones.
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I have to say that I tried out this new tool on a variety of portraits and found it challenging to apply without it looking quite obvious and not really that appealing. In other cases it basically looked like I had applied a bit of colored makeup to the face and not all that evenly. Hence, for this application, as in smoothing out skin tones, I would say less is more. I would say be very careful how strongly this tool is applied as it can quickly look fake.
IMPROVED REFELCTIONS REMOVAL
The improved reflections removal feature is welcome. This isn’t a feature I will be using ever or if so, very rarely. But as I noted in the e-book, it did not work that well in my testing so it is great to see that Adobe has improved the feature. I don’t have any examples to show this feature in use but I thought I would mention the upgrade here.
IMPROVED LANDSCAPE MASKING
The improved Masking for landscapes will be a very welcome addition to Lightroom. In previous versions it occasionally did not do that great of a job identifying various parts of the landscape so any improvements here will be very useful. As shown below, the new Landscape masking has an extra check box for “Natural Ground” that seems very accurate. In this screenshot (shown below) I have selected both Natural Ground and Mountains.
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CHANGES TO THE LIGHTROOM PREFERENCES
Along with the above changes, Lightroom has also changed a few things in the Preferences dialogs. There are now a few extra options in the External Editing preferences (as shown below). These new options allow for setting the preferences for how both SDR (normal) images and HDR images are exported to Photoshop and other external editing software. You can see my settings below for both Photoshop and Nik Silver Efex.
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There are of course other new features and improvements to Adobe Lightroom Classic that are featured in the videos above. Some of these are very useful (for my work) and others not so much. Of note, there have also been some performance improvements with the software itself helping to make Lightroom run even more efficiently and faster than previous versions.
Overall, I have to say that some of these new tools just seem to overcomplicate Lightroom unnecessarily. The new Assisted Culling feature seems clunky at best. I am guessing that the AI culling will be the one feature that hopefully improves rapidly and will be updated to work with all types of images, not just portraits. It would be great if Adobe can use AI to just cull the images without any check boxes needing to be selected. For some of my assignments, where I need to go through thousands of images quickly, and then process them right away that would be a major time saver.
Of course, what hasn’t been included in the new update is just as interesting as what has been included. There are a number of AI assisted software options out there that will cull your images (using AI) and then also go through your Lightroom catalog to see how you generally process your images and automatically process your images using AI in a manner that is similar to how you have processed other images. The software that will do this type of culling and processing include Evoto, Imagen and Aftershoot among others. Most of these of AI Software options I am referencing here are aimed at portrait and wedding photographers and would not work very well for a wide variety of photography genres. I have not tried these alternate software options out extensively but from what I have seen they can certainly cull and edit your images but the results may not be exactly what you wanted. Even though they might cull your images down you will most likely still have to go through and see if the software chose what you feel are the best images. Likewise with the image processing, for the select images I would definitely still go through the images and see what they look like and how the images look at 100% to make sure they weren’t over processed–or if they were processed as you wanted. Hopefully one of these days we will get there and AI can be used to both cull and process our images–that will be a massive time saver for photographers. I have a feeling Adobe is hard at work on this–I know internally they have been talking about this for decades.
