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Lightroom Classic 7.2—the performance boosted version of Lightroom DPReview got to test for ourselves at the end of January—has finally arrived! And with it come numerous performance improvements, better support for Intel hardware, a fix for speed issues experienced by some users, and some new features to boot.
Additionally, Adobe has also updated the new cloud-based Lightroom CC ecosystem for both desktop and mobile operating systems. Let’s take them one at a time.
Lightroom Classic Performance Boost
The company explains that it has worked with Intel to improve performance scaling on computers that have multiple cores and at least 12GB of RAM, and as we showed in January, the result is much faster importing and preview generation, and improved speed for things like adjustments rendering in Develop, HDR/Panos rendering, and more.
“One key attribute of the enhancements is that they scale appropriately with a customer’s investment in hardware,” says Adobe. Users who invest in newer, more powerful hardware will see more performance improvements, particularly if the system has at least 12GB of memory. This time around, Adobe says it focused on batch processing improvements (how efficiently system resources are used and batch tasks are completed), but the company will also focus on Interactive (interface response speed) needs in the near future.
Some users had experienced problems with Lightroom Classic slowing down over time, an issue Adobe says it has fixed “in most cases,” though it is possible some users will still experience this issue.
Lightroom Classic Feature Enhancements
Performance improvements and fixes aside, Lightroom Classic 7.2 comes with multiple new features, including a text search for finding a specific folder (“Folder Search”), the ability to filter favorites within folders, an option for creating collection sets from folders for use with Lightroom mobile, as well as a feature for creating collections from Map Module pins.
This version of Lightroom Classic also adds a library filter for unedited and edited images and enables users to create smart collections with unedited or edited images.
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Finally, Adobe says it has enabled Photoshop Continuously Scalable User Interface in the Adobe Camera Raw plugin, with the scaling limited to 100% or 200%. Support for per-monitor scaling in Windows has also been added. In explaining the plugin update, Adobe said, “This is primarily a Windows change to sync up Photoshop, and Windows users will now be able to scale the ACR plugin from 100% to 500%, in increments of 100%.”
The full Lightroom Classic 7.2 update changelog is available here, new camera support can be found here, and new lens profile support can be found here.
Updates to Lightroom CC and Lightroom Mobile
In addition to the Lightroom Classic CC updates, the whole Lightroom CC ecosystem—including the Lightroom Mobile apps on iOS and Android—have been updated as well with “optimized performance, added support for new cameras and lenses, and some great new features for desktop and Android.”
Adobe says it put a lot of effort into “tuning and improving stability” with this update. Lightroom CC on Mac and Windows will see performance improve when moving between photos, grid scrolling, and exporting, while all the apps across mobile and desktop should be “a lot more stable.”
As for new features, Lightroom CC for desktop gets the ability to add copyright to imported images; meanwhile, Lightroom Mobile on Android gets a geometry tab for correcting perspective distortion, the ability to add a watermark upon export, the ability to search your Lightroom library with Google Assistant, and a new “Add to Lr” option that will allow you to add photos from third party apps directly into your Lightroom library.
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All of these updates are available now, so if you have a Creative Cloud subscription, update to the latest versions and give them a go. And if you want to dive deeper into all of these new features, head over to the Adobe blog.
Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)