Lightroom Classic 8 Released along with lots of other Adobe updates
Today Adobe is holding it’s “Max” conference, and the company officially announced a whole bunch of updates to the various creative cloud apps. I won’t go into everything here, but the ones that interest me the most, are the updates to Lightroom and Photoshop. I’m also pretty interested in the new Premiere Rush.
Lightroom Classic 8
Lightroom has been revised to version 8 and now includes a new process version (version 5) which they claim includes improvements to high iso noise performance and also to the way negative dehaze is handled. I did some quick testing comparing various images before and after changing the process version, but I can’t see any difference in the noise.
As I know someone will ask, as far as I can see there are no improvements to the way the software demosaics Fuji X-Trans files. I’m sure, as with every other release, someone out there will claim that the X-Trans support has been “fixed” but I’m afraid, as far as I can tell, there is no difference.
Other new features include the ability to merge HDR panoramas in one go, which is pretty cool. Previously you would need to merge the individual bracketed images, and then merge those into a panorama. Well, you can now do it in one go.
It also adds depth range masking for photos taken on smartphone cameras with depth information (eg the iPhone XS), and it improves the speed canon tethering.
Overall, this hardly seems like a full version release, and more of a point upgrade, but anyway. I will report any additional findings as I use it.
There’s the usual round of camera updates too, including recent releases such as the Fuji X-T3, the Canon Eos-R and the Nikon Z7
Lightroom CC
I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t use Lightroom CC very much, either on the desktop or on my iPad. While I do like certain aspects of it, I still find it a bit clunky compared to Lightroom Classic, but it’s getting better with each release.
This version adds a few new features, including a new “people” view, the ability to migrate your Apple Photos Library, and a new sharing tab and sharing options.
Of all of these, the last is the most interesting. It adds a new feature called “connectors” which will be open to third parties. This basically is like the previous publish services in Lightroom Classic, but it also allows connection to book and print publishing services too. The only thing available at the moment is a connection to Adobe’s own “Portfolio” service, but it will be interesting to see where this heads.
There’s still some key features missing in Lightroom CC, which I really wish they would add. The biggest one for me is the lack of any way to manage RAW + Jpeg images on import. You also can’t filter by file type, or do any of the advanced filtering that you can do in the classic version.
Adobe Premiere Rush
Premiere Rush is a new and somewhat interesting application. It’s a cut-down (very cut down) version of Premiere designed for people creating content for Social Media, or YouTube. I normally wouldn’t be interested in this kind of thing as I’m pretty proficient in Final Cut Pro X and the full version of Premiere, but sometimes you do want to put out a video really quickly, and this seems ideal for that. Oh, and there’s an iOS version too!
Anyway, I haven’t dived into it too much yet, but it seems pretty straight forward and easy to use. You probably won’t be doing anything really complicated on it, but it’s pretty fast and fairly simple. The fact that it comes preconfigured to share to YouTube, Vimeo, Instagram and so on, is pretty useful too. Would I end up using this for my own projects? I don’t know, probably not, but for someone starting out and wanting to make YouTube videos, this is a pretty good option. It’s also nice to have something like this on iOS too, as it seems a bit more capable than iMovie. If you don’t mind the subscription that is.
As with Lightroom CC it appears to be cloud based, and that means your projects are shared across the cloud and available on all your devices. I’m not sure how this works with media, as surely that would use up your cloud storage pretty quickly. Anyway, I’ve only started playing with it, so I’ll have more details in a future post.
Other Updates
The other big news was the announcement of an iPad version of Photoshop. This will be pretty much the full software, but on an iPAd. It’s due for release next year. There was also a new version of Photoshop CC too, with a few new features including an improved version of content aware fill, but I haven’t had a chance to try that out yet.
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You can also show support by buying something from my from my Digital Download Store where I have Lightroom Presets, and e-books available for download. If you're a Fuji X-Trans shooter and Lightroom user, check out my guide to post processing X-Trans files in Lightroom. I also have a guides for processing X-Trans files in Capture One and Iridient Developer. For Sony Alpha shooters I have a new guide with tips on how to get the best from processing your A6000 Images in Lightroom.
