Adobe has released the latest round of Lightroom and Camera RAW updates, and in this article we’re going to concentrate on Lightroom Classic. Aside from the usual under-the-hood tweaks and bug fixes, Lightroom Classic 15.5 adds three new key features, one of which I’ve been asking for for a long time!

On a recent trip to London, I took quite a few photos and some video at the top of the Shard, one of London’s most famous buildings. I have already posted a few of these, and there are a lot more to come. However, in this post, I wanted to talk about the challenges I faced editing a subset of the images I took and how I addressed them. I ended up using both Lightroom and DaVinci Resolve’s new photo editing mode for these. The latter is something I particularly want to talk about, as it has some interesting abilities, as well as some quirks that those not familiar with the software should be aware of.

With Adobe recently adding lots of new features to Camera RAW that so far aren’t in Lightroom, users of Lightroom may be wondering how to get access to some of those new tools. Well, it’s actually very straightforward, and you can use Camera RAW from Lightroom entirely non-destructively. You just need to follow the simple workflow below.

The news that Adobe has agreed to acquire Topaz Labs has hit the creative community with a collective “what the f….”. For anyone who relies on tools like Gigapixel, Photo AI, and Video AI, I’m sure this news is a bit of a worrying development, especially if you’re one of those creators who had exited the Adobe ecosystem (”you fool … there is no escape!”).

With the last few Photoshop releases, Adobe has kept adding new features to Camera RAW. Usually, these would be added to Lightroom either at the same time or with the following release, but so recently, this hasn’t been the case. And these haven’t been minor features either, we’re talking some big, long-sought-after tools, including the colour corrector in masks, and the ability to adjust the edges and feathering of AI masks. Are we seeing a different strategy emerging from Adobe regarding its photography applications?

A set of June updates to Adobe’s Photography applications will be released later this week. This will include Lightroom Classic, Lightroom, Photoshop and so on. For the most part, these will be bug fixes and new camera support, but there are a couple of things worth noting.

Adobe’s latest Lightroom Classic update makes AI tools like Denoise and Super Resolution far less disruptive by moving their processing into the background, so they no longer take over the app, which is especially helpful when working through large batches. The update also includes a handful of performance improvements, better assisted culling detection, PSB sync support, and other smaller additions.

I was recently in Edinburgh, Scotland for a week, and while I was there I had been planning to spend quite a bit of time out taking photos around the city. Unfortunately, the weather had other plans. It was pretty much raining and cold the whole time. And when I say cold, I do mean cold. But more than that, it was really dark. Like, twilight dark the entire time. So eventually, I forced myself to get out and shoot, regardless of the result, and said result wasn’t great. However, when I got back to my computer, with a little editing I was able to get a pretty decent image of the castle. As there was such a difference between the result I got and where I started from, It thought It would make a good tutorial video, and so here you go!

Adobe has just released new versions of its photography software suite, including Lightroom Classic and Lightroom Desktop. While mostly an under-the-hood release, there are a few new features, including the ability to you send your images directly to Adobe Firefly to create video from your photos using AI. You can also edit your images in firefly using AI. Other new features include improved Assisted Culling and Topaz Gigapixel support directly in Lightroom Desktop.

Following on from last week’s Lightroom video, where I showed you a feature of the software that not many people know about, I’ve done another collection of lesser known tips and tricks. This time, I’ve collected 5 tips that people may know some of, but may not fully know. 

When you’ve been using software for a long time you often pick up tricks and techniques and they become habits and you forget how you heard about them in the first place. I was recently editing an image for a friend in Lightroom as they watched, and when I did the technique in this video, they were surprised as they had no idea you could do that. I then realised that perhaps there is quite a few people out there who don’t know that you can do this either. That technique is editing by dragging the histogram.

Over the past few years, Adobe has been adding to the AI processing functionality of Lightroom, with Denoise and Super Resolution. But the OG of these, the one which was the original “Enhance Details” was what is now known as RAW Details. Most people probably only ever use this now in conjunction with the other two, and you may be wondering what is even the point of RAW details on its own. Well, I was recently going through a few photos I shot the other day, and I saw something that demonstrated perfectly how Raw Details can actually work. Allow me to explain….

Nik Silver Efex is one of the longest running Lightroom and Photoshop plug-ins out there, and I think it was one of the first plug-ins I ever bought. This was years ago before the suite was owned by DXO and even before they were owned by Google before that. In recent versions, some aspects of the software have changed quite a bit. As I haven’t covered it in quite a while, I thought I would share a few random tips for using the latest version.

In my most recent Photo Journal post, I talked about my trip to Berlin back in March of this year. I had previously promised that I would make the presets I used to create the “Berlin” look on some of these available, so here it is in the post below.

Recently, I had one of my backup hard drives fail on me, and it reminded me that my archiving and backup setup for my photography needs some work. While I do have a comprehensive solution for client work, my personal projects are in a somewhat precarious state. Ideally, you should have your important data backed up in at least three places, but I suspect many people don’t do that. However, it occurred to me that I actually have multiple cloud services that I probably don’t fully utilise, so after a little thinking I came up with a way to doubly and triple protect my work going forward. It involves using Apple Photos and Lightroom desktop.