Photoshop & Lightroom Launch Its Largest Set of Features Since Adobe MAX In The June Update To Creative Cloud

David J. Crewe

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Adobe CC June Updates Give Powerful Improvements to LR PS SLR Lounge 2000x1125

There’s no doubt about it, if you’re a creative, you use or have used a product from the Adobe library. They’re a powerhouse of tools so useful it’s hard to think of any collection that can rival it. Well, just because they’re one of the biggest, doesn’t mean they are going to slow things down any time soon. Check out some of these recent stats around the Creative Cloud;

  • Photoshop on iPad has been downloaded over 2 million times and customers have created over 5 million cloud documents with Photoshop on iPad.
  • Adobe has seen an uptick from social content creators leveraging Premiere Rush to keep up with the growing demand for online video content. The app has seen a 75% increase in monthly active users quarter over quarter.
  • Over 1.5 million users started an in-app tutorial in Lightroom last month and over 3 million viewed an inspirational edit.
  • Behance’sfree jobs board currently has 1,500+ postings.
  • Since most stay at home orders went into effect in late March, Photoshop on iPad has seen a more than 40% increase in weekly average installs through May.
  • Adobe launched a $1m Adobe Creative Residence Community Fund to expand resources to creatives beyond our annual Creative Residents program.

[Related Reading: Adobe Events Go Virtual for 2020 In Response to Covid-19]

That’s all pretty impressive and the line-up of announcements for the Creative Cloud update for June is just as impressive. So much so I’d recommend heading over to the official Adobe Blog Here to check out everything you may be interested in, as for this post we’re going to focus on the new features for Lightroom, and Photoshop

So let’s dive right into what’s new in Adobe Lightroom.

Learning Updates (Lightroom Mac/Win, iOS, Android)

Lightroom SharedEdits

First up is the expansion of the Interactive Tutorials that are available in Lightroom. These consist of the following two flavors;

  • Guided Tutorials (available in the Lightroom Learn section), allow you to learn by doing, and you can actually adjust each slider with guidance and instruction provided by the instructor along the way. Instructors give the critical context for why they made their editing choices, and you can practice using their image directly in Lightroom. These are for when you want to go deeper and practice.
  • Interactive Edits (available in the Lightroom Discover section) let you see the step-by-step edits on a photo, view camera information, and even download a preset to apply the settings to your own images.

Adobe has expanded the library of tutorials by adding many more authors that cover a much wider set of topics and image subjects, and they plan on continuing that growth well into the new year. Keep your eyes peeled as you might see someone familiar to SLR Lounge readers there soon 😉 With this expansion, you can now “follow” an instructor so you can see their other guides and be notified whenever they add something new for you to learn and experiment with.

Editing Updates

Local Hue (ACR, Lightroom Classic, Lr Mac/Win, iOS, Android)

Lightroom LocalHue

This new Hue editing tool is available as a local adjustment control to be used for both corrective and creative purposes. This will let you have very precise control to make localized edits to hue in your images, instead of always affecting the global level.

Versions (Lightroom Mac/Win, iOS, Android)

Versions

Now you don’t need to worry about going too far with your edits! You can now create different edit treatments on the same image. It’s great for when you want a B&W version and a color version, for example, or when you want a variety of different crops for publishing to different social media sites. Versions sync across Lightroom on all your devices, so versions you create in one place are available to you everywhere.

RAW Defaults (Lr Mac/Win, iOS, Android)

Raw Defaults Summary

Streamline your edit workflow by specifying the default edit settings for your raw photos. You can have Lightroom automatically respect the look that you chose in camera when you were taking the picture, or you can specify any default edit settings you wish by using a custom preset.

ISO Adaptive Presets (ACR, Lightroom Classic)

ISO Adaptive Presets

An ISO Adaptive Preset allows a single preset to apply different edit settings to different photos depending on their ISO. For example, you could have a single preset that applies different levels of noise reduction to high ISO images and low ISO images. ISO Adaptive Presets are designed to work great with raw defaults.

Edit in Photoshop (Lightroom iPad)

Edit in Photoshop

Lightroom on iPad can send images to Photoshop for iPad through the new “Edit in Photoshop” option.

Centered Crop Overlay (ACR, Lightroom Classic)

centered crop overlay

Crop overlays are a useful way to ensure your photo composition is on point. The June release adds a new centered overlay, which is particularly useful when using a square crop or bringing attention to the center of your frame.

Sharing Improvements

Watermarks (Lightroom Mac/Win, iOS, Android)

Watermarks

Add a watermark to your photos when exporting your images from Lightroom. Watermarks are synced across your devices, so you can create your watermark once and have it available everywhere.

Shared album improvements

Adobe has made some improvements to shared albums in this release. You’ll now receive in-app notifications whenever somebody comments or likes an image. And these likes and comments are now visible in a new Activity Panel in Lightroom for Mac and Win.

UI, Search, & Performance Improvements (Finally!)

Camera Raw new look and feel

ACR UI Improvements

See all the edit panels, change tools faster, move the filmstrip — looks great at high resolution and adapts nicely to all screen sizes.

Tone Curve, Color Panel, and Sync UI improvements (Lightroom Classic)

classic tone curve improvements

Enjoy the fresh and functional updates to fundamental tools with new color hinting and precise curve adjustments. The Sync experience is also clearer through a more prominent sync icon on the Module Picker nav bar. Sync management is no longer hidden under the name plate. Now, you can quickly and easily manage and understand your sync status with the new dedicated sync tab.

Performance improvements (Lightroom Classic)

Considering this has been the biggest request since the old LR4 nearly a decade ago, you can bet I’m happy and excited to see the differences and improvements here. According to Adobe, performance is their biggest focus area in Lightroom Classic. In the last year, they’ve released updates that added GPU acceleration for image editing and enhancing details.

The next big areas ripe for optimization are Library grid scrolling, Collection search and filtering, and scrubbing Develop sliders. With today’s update, you’ll experience faster scrolling and less stuttering especially while navigating up and down larger catalogs and sifting through longer lists of collections.

Search improvements (Lightroom Mac/Win, iOS, Android, lightroom.adobe.com)

Improved results when searching for “cat” or “dog.” And finally,

Updated icons

We’ve updated the Lightroom product icons in the June release. Check out this blog post for more details. For more information about all of the improvements and updates in each product, please see the What’s New pages for:

Lightroom for Mac and Windows

Lightroom for iOS

Lightroom for Android

Lightroom Classic

Camera Raw

[Related Reading: Adobe Offers Its Annual 99U Creative Conference As A Free Virtual Event In Response to Covid-19]

Now, let’s move on to what’s new with Adobe Photoshop!

Adobe Photoshop has released updates for both the desktop and iPad versions of the app today, with features ranging from Sensei AI machine learning magic, to performance improvements that’ll reduce your workload steps and increase your productivity! Adobe researchers have invented a completely new Sensei AI and machine learning tech to deliver incredible automatic selection results—the double bonus of fantastic magic and workflow improvements wrapped into one experience. Lets dive in!

Photoshop on Desktop

Select Subject with Portrait Power

Photoshop Select Subject Hair 2

With this release, Adobe’s added even more brain-power to first detect the type of object you’re selecting and then apply new specialized selection techniques per the needs of the content, with a lot of extra focus on getting hair right

Photoshop Select Subject

AdobeCamera Raw (ACR) User Experience Improvements

ACR Curves2

Image adjustments and batch processing is more intuitive and simpler to navigate. Sliders now look and feel more like Lightroom. New Crop tool improvements consolidate functionality into more convenient options. The Curves UI is updated and simpler to use and to visualize changes. In addition, the controls can now be stacked vertically to reduce the number of clicks required to  nd the functions you need.

Adobe Fonts Auto-Activation

Fonts Auto Activation

Adobe Fonts are now automatically activated when you open a Photoshop document.

Rotatable Patterns

Photoshop Rotatable Patterns Leaves

Any pattern applied in Photoshop can now be rotated as a property of that pattern (similar to adjusting the scale of a pattern). Now, easily change the rotation angle of pattern fills, pattern overlays, and even pattern strokes. Best of all, the rotation is completely non-destructive and can easily be reset or altered.

Photoshop Rotate Patterns

Match Font Update

Photoshop Match Font

Match Fonts is a Sensei AI machine learning feature that enables you to identify fonts that appear in your images. In this release, Adobe’s responded to their top customer feedback on this feature and improved the matching experience with support for more fonts, vertical text (as above), and multiple-line detection.

Photoshop on iPad

Lightroom-linked Editing in Photoshop on iPad

Starting today, you can seamlessly move an image from Lightroom to Photoshop and back so you can easily process large sets of images in Lightroom and also transform them into something completely new using Photoshop on the iPad. You can do the following in this first step of the updates;

  • Send an image from Lightroom to Photoshop so you can edit it.
  • All the tools in Photoshop are available to use when editing a photo from Lightroom.
  • Once you’ve sent a photo from Lightroom to Photoshop, you can either send it right back to Lightroom, or keep it as a new cloud document.

Adobe Capture Extension

With Adobe Capture you can take a photo of your surroundings, or an Adobe Stock image or any image source and incorporate characteristics of it into your work. As you can see from the leopard example above, you can pull patterns, shapes, color themes and gradients from the image to use in creative ways. Transform the coarse texture of tree bark or sweeping wisps of grass into the symmetry of a brick face or turn patterns of metal work into digital assets. Easily vectorize images and work with them as shapes or masks. Add the assets to your Library to access them anywhere you have CC Libraries. In addition, you can batch process multiple assets at once, or quickly extract multiple assets from a single image to reduce steps and save time.

Final Thoughts

PhotoshopCamera NOFILTER3

If you can believe it, there is a LOT more coming and currently available in the rest of the Adobe Creative Suite which you can find links too from the blog post here. The apps include Illustrator, InDesign, Premiere Pro, XD, Audition, and much much more including adobe’s new Mobile app Photoshop Camera! There are so many updates it’ll take me weeks to just start scratching the surface of them all to test! So with that, I’ll be updating my Creative Suite immediately and will let you know should any conflicts and problems arise. As usual, let us know if you have any questions or concerns in the comments below especially if they pertain to testing out any of these awesome new features.

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