As of Tuesday morning, Adobe has released another batch of updates for Lightroom CC and Classic, Lightroom CC version 1.3 and Lightroom Classic CC version 7.3, just two short months from the last batch of updates! Additionally, the Lightroom versions for both iOS and Android have been updated with significant enhancements.
The big focus of these updates are with Profiles — more about those below. Beyond Profiles, most of the updates and changes are incremental and/or community specific requests. Below is a quick run down of the changes for each platform …
- Three new full sets of Profiles have been added, including Adobe Raw, Creative and camera profiles
- Support for Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices has been added, allowing CC users to keep local copies of their files on a NAS device
Lightroom Classic Feature Updates
- New Adobe Raw and Creative Profiles have been added and are now accessible from the Basic panel in the Develop module
- Everyone’s favorite Dehaze slider moved to the Basic panel (a popular community request)
- The Tone Curve tool in the Develop module has been enlarged to make it easier to use (another popular community request)
Here is Adobe’s official blog post on these updates:
April Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw Releases: New Profiles and More
Profiles
This is the biggest feature change/update for both CC and Classic. However, you may be asking yourself: what are profiles?? Are those like presets? And the answer is: sort of!
Lightroom Classic has long had this feature but, it was buried deep in the Develop module where few knew about it, let alone used it. The way we at LRG like to think about Profiles is like film stock. Back in the film camera days, different film manufactures and types of film were prized for the different way the individual film stocks would convey color. Some film had more pop while others had smoother or richer gradients of tones. Different film stocks were prized for different shooting and conditions and subject matter. And not just film stock but, most cameras bodies would also produce a wide variety of color results.
Ironically enough, these same fundamental differences continue to play a key role in digital photography. Different camera bodies and different sensors each have a unique look. To manage for this, Lightroom developed “camera profiles” to account for variations in color representations, even allowing for users to manually update these profiles to shift the way colors could be displayed.
The practical upshot of this is: users will now have more creative options to develop a look or style based on different profiles that Adobe has included in Lightroom. Adobe has seeded bother versions of Lightroom with +50 different profiles and 3rd party companyes will be able to write their own Profiles and sell them to consumers, just as we have with the Presets marketplace.
However, it’s easy to confuse the difference between Profiles and Presets. Presets do something very similar visually and they have been in much more regular use by Lightroom users. Without getting into too much into the technical details, here is an easy way to think about Profiles: they’re like film stock.
When you apply a Profile to an image, it will change the visual look of the image. It’s that simple. And, while you will be able to undo the change, you won’t be able to tweak the Profile look very much using any of the sliders. Profiles are design to achieve specific results with a click of a button and from there, you can still use Presets and manual slider adjustments to make changes you want to your photos.
While Classic has always had profiles, they are now more accessible as they have been moved to the top of the Basic panel in the Develop module. Lightroom CC didn’t have Profiles and in this release they are getting a full implementation, thereby keeping CC on par with Classic in terms of developing tools.
You can read more about Profiles and the other key updates on Adobe’s official Lightroom blog post: April Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw Releases: New Profiles and More
