Adobe today announced a new round of updates to its photo workflow software ecosystem. This includes new releases of all of the major versions of Lightroom, and it brings Lightroom Classic to version 9. Lightroom mobile on iOS and Android is now at version 5 and Lightroom Desktop is now at version 3.

Here is a summary of what’s in the new releases.

Lightroom Classic

Lightroom Classic is now at version 9 and there are a number of useful new features as well as some behind the scenes updates.

Under the hood improvements

This version gets a new catalogue format, and it will require you to upgrade your existing one. This is to facilitate improvements in the future. The GPU acceleration also gets new improvements, and Post Crop Vignette will now be updated in realtime as you crop. There are also lots of other under the hood tweaks and improvements too and several bug fixes and new camera support.

The system requirements for Lightroom 9 have also changed. On the Mac, High Sierra is now the minimum supported operating system, and on Windows, you need Windows 10 Version 1607 or v1803 or later.

Panorama Fill Edges

You can now use content aware fill in the panorama merge tool to fill in the empty edges outside of the image area, that you would normally crop out. This is a single checkbox in the panorama merge window, and all you have to do is check the checkbox.

I’ve been using the beta for some time and this works pretty well in most circumstances but your mileage will vary depending on your panorama. The larger area to fill, obviously the more chance for errors, and you may well end up having to crop some of it anyway, depending on what it actually at the edges of your image. It works really ell with skies, and is really useful for filling in the sky. If you have buildings or other complex detail it may look a little “cloned” but sometimes this works well too. Overall, it’s still a really useful addition to the panorama function.

Multiple Batch Export

You can now export using multiple presets simultaneously. This is one of my favourite features from Capture One, and I’m glad it’s now possible in Lightroom too. From the export dialog box, you can select multiple export presets, and export to different locations, at different resolutions simultaneously. For example, you could export a full res Tiff for your archive, a scaled Jpeg for your online portfolio and a different version again for social media, all simultaneously.

Export Preset Groups

You can now export groups of presets from the develop module. Previously you could only export individual presets. If you wanted to export croups of presets you had to locate them in the Finder or Windows Explorer. You can now export a whole group by right clicking on it in the Develop Module.

Clear History Above Current Step

This allows you to clear the history above a selected step in the history panel. This is useful if you go back in your history and start editing again, and want to clear the rest of the history above that step that is no longer relevant.

Colour Label Filtering for Folders and Collections in the Library

You can now filter your folders and collections by colour label in the Library.

Lightroom Desktop 3.0

Lightroom desktop gains a number of new functions too. I haven’t used this as much, so I’ll just give you a quick summary of what’s new:

Tutorials and Guided Edits which were previously added to the mobile versions of Lightroom are now on the desktop version too.
The Fill Edges on Panorama Merge have also been added to the desktop version
GPU Acceleration. The desktop version gains GPU acceleration similar to Lightroom Classic.
Print to White House Custom Colour. Using the new connections feature, Adobe has partnered with professional Print house “White House Custom Colour” to allow you to access their service directly from Lightroom desktop.
Migrate from Photoshop Elements
Advanced Export. The export window has been beefed up with much more options, including the ability to now export as a Tiff, set the resolution, compression, metadata, file naming, output sharpening and colour space. Unfortunately there is still no option for watermarking on export.

Lightroom Mobile 5.0

Lightroom mobile also gets some new features in this release, depending on which platform you are on.

Contextual Help can now be accessed by tapping on the ? Button on the top of the screen. (Android and iOS)
Batch Editing: You can now copy and apply edits to multiple photos in one go. You can copy edits from one photo and then select a group of photos and apply the copied edits to them.

Conclusion

It should be noted that while these are major version number upgrades, Adobe no longer really does big landmark releases. A new version number is really just denoting new development cycle, so they don’t release a major set of features like they used to in the old perpetual licence days. Instead, Adobe rolls out new features over the whole cycle. There's also major updates today to Photoshop, and Photoshop for iPad has aslo been released.