Today, Adobe announced updates to the Lightroom ecosystem, including GPU-accelerated editing in Lightroom Classic and Camera Raw, providing a smoother and more responsive experience. Finally! (And hopefully) the update we’ve been waiting for since long before the Creative Cloud subscription service came into play. If this works as well as i’m hoping, I’ll officially stop complaining as much as I have been! (trust me, anyone who has to work in close proximity knows my woes with LR processing speeds).
In Adobe’s official August Photography Update the details say they’ve focused on “Performance and improving your workflow” adding several minor improvements and additions listed below. At the time of this write up and release, we’ve not been able to get hands on directly with the application so we can’t confirm these improvements yet, but believe me, I’ll be downloading and running tests on this as soon as it’s available and will update accordingly! I’ll time a random batch edit and export tonight to compare it to the updated version once it’s live.
This update is supposed to enhance your workflow by finally taking advantage or GPU acceleration, allowing Lightroom to leverage your video cards while editing, giving you a “smoother and more responsive experience.” According to the blog post, the performance enhancements will be most noticeable if you’re using a larger 4K or higher resolution monitor, and obviously a newer and more powerful GPU/Video card
Check Pricing & Availability here
Additional new features include:
- Speed up your workflow with batch merge for HDR and panoramas (Lightroom Classic).
- Download edits found on Discover posts as presets by tapping on the three-dot menu at the top of each post, afterward head to your preset library to start applying them to your images (Lightroom for mobile, iOS and Android).
- Recover deleted photos on the device you’re using (free users) and any devices connected to your account (premium subscriptions) (Lightroom Ecosystem). For those of you using the cloud based Lightroom,(mobile), this is great news since we’ve all accidentally deleted or removed images we were working on. This will save us all countless hours of “whoops” work and starting over.
- Embrace the rainbow by using color labels to organize your collections, collection sets and smart collections (Lightroom Classic).
- Export your photos as PNGs (Lightroom Classic and Camera Raw)
To learn more about these updates, head over to the Adobe Blog. And if you’re a Creative Cloud subscriber, simply update your Lightroom and Camera RAW apps to the latest versions via the Creative Cloud Desktop App to take advantage of all the new features.
So what do you think? Are you going to be downloading this update right away like me? Or will you be waiting for my (and others) testing and updates to this post? Have you been waiting for a proper performance increase in LR? Have you switched Raw Processing engines already? Let us know in the comments below.
