Lightroom Classic Updated with GPU Acceleration for Image Editing
Adobe today released its August update for the Lightroom family, and it contains a pretty big new feature that people have been requesting for ages. This update finally brings GPU acceleration to image editing. There are some other features too, but I’ll get to those in a minute.
If you’re thinking: “wait, didn’t Lightroom already have GPU acceleration?” Yes, it did, but only for the display of images. The new version will also accelerate editing in the develop module. Unfortunately the support is limited to select GPUs. If you have a fairly modern, metal supported GPU on the Mac it should be supported. I’m not sure what the requirements are on the PC.
Unfortunately, I don’t have a compatible GPU so I wasn’t able to test it. This acceleration is also present in Camera Raw. According to Adobe, acceleration is more pronounced if you’re using a 4K or higher display. I would love to hear from anyone with a supported system if you notice a major difference.
Other Features - Lightroom Classic
There are other features as part of this release too. In no particular oder…
- PNG export support for Lightroom Classic and Camera RAW. You can now export as a PNG from Lightroom.
- Colour Labels for Collections in Lightroom Classic. Collections can now have their own colour labels.
- Library Module Performance Improvements
- Batch Merge for HDR, HDR Panoramas, and Panoramas. This allows you to batch process the creation of merged items by creating a stack first of the bracketed images, and you can then batch process the stacks
Other Features for desktop, cloud and mobile versions of Lightroom
There are also some new features throughout the rest of the Lightroom ecosystem. These include…
- Recover Deleted Images (Lightroom Desktop, Mobile and Web)
- Create Presets from Discover Posts (Lightroom Mobile)
- Improved Search Options (Lightroom Mobile)
- Batch Metadata (Lightroom for Android, Chrome OS)
For full details of the new releases, check out Adobe’s blog post on this round of updates. Speaking of Lightroom, don’t forget to check out my ongoing Lightroom Preset sale, which is ending soon, at the end of August. There’s currently up to 50% off some of my Lightroom Preset Packs.
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