Key new Features of Adobe’s October 2024 Photography Releases
Adobe has just held its annual adobe MAX conference, and as part of the event it announced a slew of new updates across its product lines. This, of course included its Photography products, and all versions of Lightroom, Camera Raw and Photoshop have been updated. In this blog post, I’m going to cover a few of the key new features across the lineup. I’m not going to cover everything because there’s too much, and Adobe already has an in-depth article about the new features. So consider this sort of a new features speed run!
Lightroom Classic 14
Adobe has done a weird thing for the last few years, where the major number releases of Lightroom Classic only get relatively minor or under the hood features. The point releases tend to get more of the user-facing goodies. This year is no different, although some of the enhancements will undoubtedly be useful. Here’s a quick rundown of what’s new:
- Generative remove is now out of “technical preview” so should be better. They also mentioned that selections for generative remove should be better now too. You can now select objects by scribbling over them.
- Performance has been improved in the develop module for image selection. This means that as you move from one image to another, the process should be quicker. Adobe is claiming a two times improvement in speed here, but I guess it’s still dependent on your system, where your images are stored and so on. In my tests, this does seem noticeably faster, although it still lags occasionally.
- Improved HDR Support: You can now view HDR images in the library, and they have added “Gain Map” support on export. What this means is that you can effectively export images with both SDR and HDR versions in the one file.
- Preview management has been improved, and you can now set a cache size limit to control how much disk space is used when storing previews.
- Denoise now works on additional file types, including Apple ProRAW and DNG files created by Lightroom, such as those used for panoramas.
- Content Credentials: Lightroom now automatically embeds content credentials into any image that has been edited using the AI tools in Lightroom. This is part of the company’s AI transparency push, and you can find more details about Content Authenticity here.
[UPADTE] Some people are experiencing some issues with the update according to forum posts on the Adobe website (see the first comment below) so you may want to hold off updating. I haven’t had any problems for what it’s worth.
Lightroom (desktop)
In addition to the Denoise and generative fill enhancements from Classic, the desktop version of Lightroom (not-classic) has added some workflow improvements including:
- Smart Albums: You can now save searches as smart albums
- Connect to Third-Party Apps: You can now round-trip photos from Lightroom to other applications for editing.
- You can now batch apply presets to images in Lightroom
The ability to edit in third-party applications has long been requested by users of the software and goes a ways to addressing one of the big shortcomings of Lightroom Desktop compared to Classic: the lack of plug-ins. The way this works is a bit clunky still, but it’s better than nothing!
Camera Raw
It used to be the case where the improvements in Camera Raw would basically match what was in Lightroom Classic (as they share the same engine) but lately Adobe has been using Camera Raw to preview new features that have eventually made it into Lightroom, and this year is no different. There are a couple of big features here which are quite interesting:
Adaptive Profile
This is really interesting. At first, I didn’t really understand what they were talking about here, but this is basically a profile, in the same way that Adobe Colour, Adobe Standard etc. is, but it uses AI to enhance your image. It doesn’t alter the controls, so you can still continue to edit normally. Consider it like an auto mode, but on steroids. It works in HDR too, and supports the Gain Maps mentioned earlier so it will create both HDR and SDR versions of your image.
There’s a lot to this and Adobe has a comprehensive technically detailed blog post on it if you are keen to know more. I did some quick testing with this, and it’s ok, but it’s not as amazing as they’re making it out to be. I've tried it on about 5 images so far, and it’s been kind of “meh”. You can, of course, continue editing after you use this, and you can also control the amount with a slider. Once Ive had more time to test it on a wider range of photos, I’ll write a follow-up report on it.
Generative Expand Beta
The crop tool in Camera Raw will now support generative expand so that you can use AI to fill in the edges of your image if you crop outside of image data. You could already do this in Photoshop, so it’s not a massive deal here, but will be more so when it comes to Lightroom.
Photoshop
The one thing that I want to mention in Photoshop is one of the new additions to the generative AI tools. This will automatically detect and remove distractions in a scene - such as telephone wires etc. It also works to find people to remove. For wires and the likes it’s pretty great from my quick testing, however for people it still needs a bit of work.
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