Lightroom and Other Adobe Photography Updates Coming This Week

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 are doing a weird thing here and lifting the embargo before the updates actually ship, so if you don’t see them in the Creative Cloud app immediately (at time of publishing), try again midweek.

Lightroom Classic and Lightroom desktop get new improvements to the AI models and technology. Assisted culling gets some improvements, and there is a new subject detection model, which they claim will improve … well…subject detection, I suppose. The biggest thing here is the new local models for Denoise. If you are on a Mac, Denoise now uses Apple’s ML cores and runs locally, so it should work even without an internet connection.

Lightroom Desktop (Or Just “Lightroom”) now lets you use Topaz AI Sharpening directly in the software, though it will cost credits. You can now also generate a video from an image directly in Lightroom (not Classic), without sending it to Firefly first, and it will use the various partner models. It’s basically the same thing; you just don’t have to send the image to Firefly first. The quality is still pretty bad in my opinion.

(See the video below - it might look ok in a little window on the web, but view it full screen and you’ll see what I mean)

Photoshop also includes updates to its on-device models, and the remove reflections tool is now available in Photoshop without going through Camera Raw. I’ve actually missed some of the recent Photoshop updates, as I don’t pay enough attention to the release notes, but in the May release, they added the local model for the remove tool, too.

Speaking of Camera Raw, there have been a whole bunch of new features added in the last few versions that have yet to make it to Lightroom. This is a bit strange, because it used to be the case that the two engines were kept relatively in sync. But with the past two versions, Camera RAW has added depth mapping in Masks, a new “Projection” tool to fix certain types of distortion, and a tool to feather AI masks (finally). None of these are in Lightroom yet.