Jun 8

Jun 8 Lightroom Classic 10.3 Released. Apple Silicon Native and Super Resolution

Today, as part of the June photography updates, Adobe launches the latest version of Lightroom Classic. Version 10.3 brings native support for Apple silicon, as well as adding the “Super Resolution” feature from the most recent release of Photoshop.

Apple Silicon Native

Version 10.3 of Lightroom Classic is now a universal binary on the Mac, and this brings native Apple Silicon support to Apple’s M1 Macs. I have been testing this, and to be honest, it was so good under rosetta, that you won’t notice a huge difference, however when importing and exporting there is a difference, with both being about 20% faster. I did a quick video testing this and I’ll embed that below.

(At time of publishing YouTube is having issues processing this so it may be low resolution. Check back later - the full video is on 4k)

One thing I did notice was that when importing a lot of images on the older rosetta version, it would sometimes set the fans going on my MacBook Pro, but this doesn’t seem to happen (at least not as much) on the current Apple silicon version.

Super Resolution

Lightroom now includes “Super Resolution” - the AI based upscaling solution that made quite a splash in the most recent version of Photoshop and Camera RAW. This now allows you to upscale your images at a high quality from within Lightroom. This also changes the older “Enhance Details” command to become “Enhance” and the previous “Enhance Details” is now called “Raw Details” inside of this panel.

VRAM and Metadata Impovements

With this release they have optimised the use of VRAM when in the develop module, so users with a higher amount of VRAM should see some performance improvements

They have also improved the performance of certain functions in the metadata panel, and fixes some performance related bugs.

Tone Curve

This release also improves the performance of the Tone Curve on MacOS.

Changes to Presets and Profiles

There is a minor change to Presets and Profiles with this release. This shouldn’t affect front facing users, but will change the way presets and profiles are stores. Basically, they are not longer stored as a hierarchy within the settings folder, but instead use the “group” data within the preset file to manage folders of presets.

If you create and share your own presets, it is now recommended that you use the “export group” function from within Lightroom rather than actually going to the settings folder on your computer.

there is also a change to the way the “Process Version” checkbox is handled. You will no longer get a warning if the checkbox is unticked, but the process version automatically gets selected if any other selected adjustment requires it. This also affects copy and paste.