The rollout begins today, so you’ll see the updates soon if you haven’t already. Adobe is calling this a major set of updates, and I’ll highlight the ones that apply to photographers.
Adobe says this is the largest batch of features since the Adobe MAX conference in November 2019. New features range from the Sensei AI machine learning improvement and performance improvements that will reduce steps and increase productivity on your workflows. There are also improvements and better communications between Lightroom for iPad and Lightroom on the desktop.
Photoshop
Select Subject has been improved with a whole set of additional new algorithms that make one-click selections of portraits, which happen to be the most-selected subject in Photoshop, better than ever before. Now, you get even better results with the same single-click, with a deep emphasis on hair. There’s more on how this works on the Adobe site.
Other things you’ll find in the update include auto-activation for Adobe Fonts when you open a Photoshop document that uses fonts you haven’t installed on your machine yet, as well as rotatable patters and an update to its existing Match Font tool that now also uses Sensei to help you find matching fonts from a photograph. The AI algorithm detects and recognizes the font in a photograph; maybe you have a picture of text on a wall, in a sign, on the side of a car, etc. The algorithm somehow determines that the pixels in the image are text, figures out what font it is, and then searches through your fonts to find a match for that text. If you want, you can also download a matched font from Adobe Fonts.
Lightroom
With the new Local Hue controls, Lightroom users can make fine-grained changes to things like skin tones without affecting the color of the entire image. Versions lets photographers experiment with different editing approaches to the same image and keep as many as they like. And iPad users can send their images to Photoshop on iPad for even more editing power.
Here are the changes relating to iPad integration:
- Send an image from Lightroom to Photoshop so you can edit it.
- All the tools in Photoshop are available to use when editing a photo from Lightroom.
- Once you’ve sent a photo from Lightroom to Photoshop, you can either send it right back to Lightroom or keep it as a new cloud document.
Adobe Camera Raw (ACR)
The UI of ACR has been completely revised to more closely match the Lightroom layout. Many users will be jolted by the changes, as hardly anything is in the same place it was before. Still, once you get used to it, I think it will be an improvement.
Image adjustments and batch processing is more intuitive and simpler to navigate. Sliders now look and feel more like Lightroom. New Crop tool improvements consolidate functionality into more convenient options. The Curves UI is updated and simpler to use and to visualize changes. In addition, the controls can now be stacked vertically to reduce the number of clicks required to find the functions you need. You can find more details here.
There’s more to this major release, and there are more details at the Adobe blog. The updates don’t go to every Create Cloud customer at once, but most people will see them today.
