Big Lightroom Update - October 2022

[Spike]

If you use Lightroom, you should be aware that the update released this week adds major new features that continue its development from a digital asset manager with a RAW processor into a full-fledged photo editor. With each recent update, Photoshop has become less necessary for people not editing for commercial purposes. The new tools add AI-driven selection beyond the subject and sky choices that came with the last release. These include selections for people (more than one now), all sorts of sub-selections within people such as hair, skin, etc., objects, and background. The other big addition is content-aware removal, similar to what is in Photoshop. The selections are very “clean,” better than what was available before using the Auto-Mask option available for years in Lightroom for use with the tools. Selection can be done very roughly and, almost all the time, find the proper edges, in my one day of experience with the new update.


For me, it means that I only go to Photoshop for compositing and addition of text. Until today, I have used content-aware removal fairly often, which meant creating a TIFF, launching Photoshop, and returning. The steps taken in Photoshop were basically lost once the image was returned to Lightroom and could not be selectively undone.


Here are a couple videos that demonstrate the new features:

 

[Citysnaps]

What I find astonishing is not so much that these features were released, but that they appear to work so well, with so little user effort. They're almost magic. I'm looking forward to re-editing some of my urban photos and portraits with them.

As an aside, I remember resisting the move to LR going subscription five years ago. And finally biting the bullet three years ago subscribing. With Adobe releasing frequent and excellent updates over the last few years I no longer mind.

 

[Spike]

Just as an example of what someone (me) who is not an Adobe evangelist or instructor can do, here is something that took about five minutes, half of which was deciding what I wanted to do. I did try changing the lip color (very easy as Terry White's video above shows) but thought the original color worked best. Some skin smoothing, some warming of skin tone, desaturated the whites of the eyes, darkened the iris and pupil, darkened the hair, obviously took down and blurred the background. I did find that it was difficult, if not impossible, to use Photoshop to correctly remove the white highlight just to the right of her right eye. It's possible this could have been done effectively in Photoshop with some slow and careful patching up of the edge of the face but this photo wasn't worth the effort. Also interesting was the the "people select" tool picked up the ghosting from the shutter drag and correctly assigned it to the person. And did a great job with the hair.

Thanks to Citysnaps for suggesting I post about the update.

 

[Eric]

Looking forward to this, while it appears to be heavily geared towards people/portraits some of the new masking and content aware updates look like they will be handy. I pretty much live in LRC all day every day so can't wait to get started, would be really nice to get the HLS sliders on masks, fingers crossed.

 

[Spike]

Looking forward to this, while it appears to be heavily geared towards people/portraits some of the new masking and content aware updates look like they will be handy. I pretty much live in LRC all day every day so can't wait to get started, would be really nice to get the HLS sliders on masks, fingers crossed.

The videos emphasize the portraits applications, but it is major with the ability to detect different features. However, I have already used both object selection and the content aware removal and find them incredibly useful.

 

[mack]

It always seemed weird that Lightroom had the healing brush but no content aware without popping over to Photoshop. Glad they finally fixed that! On mobile I currently use TouchRetouch for that, which is already pretty great, but having it built into Lightroom is a much easier workflow.

I also really like the new masking features. Those are things that I would very rarely do to photos, only some of the ones I was thinking of printing to go that extra bit in the editing. The past year (since last year's update) it's been so easy I find myself doing it more. And these new masking options will just further what I'm willing to do in a quick edit.