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After accidentally publishing the announcement yesterday, today Adobe has officially released its August Photography update for Lightroom Classic CC and Adobe Camera Raw, bringing with it a number of improvements including GPU Accelerated Editing.
As explained in a post on the Adobe Blog, GPU Accelerated Editing allows ‘Lightroom Classic and Camera Raw take advantage of the more powerful graphics cards (GPUs) while editing, providing a smoother and more responsive experience.’ Specifically, Adobe says the acceleration will ‘more pronounced with larger resolution monitors (4k and above) as well as with more powerful GPUs.’
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| A screenshot of the new splash screen that will greet you after updating Lightroom Classic CC. |
This update won’t fix all of the complaints lobbed at Lightroom Classic CC, but it does address one of the program’s biggest issues—speed.
We took the update for a quick spin on a 2016 Retina MacBook Pro with a Radeon Pro 455 2GB and Intel HD Graphics 530 GPUs and although it’s difficult to quantify the exact improvement, we immediately noticed adjustments made to Raw photos captured on a Canon EOS R were applied much faster than the previous version of Lightroom Classic CC. From small, incremental adjustments to large two-stop exposure adjustments, the image immediately adapted to the new settings—something not always possible before unless you were using Smart Previews to make edits.
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| A screenshot from Adobe showing the new PNG export module. |
Aside from the GPU Accelerated Editing, both Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom Classic CC have gained PNG export support. Lightroom Classic CC has also received updates to the Library Module for improved navigation through folders, Color Labels for Collections and batch processing for HDR and panorama merges.
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| A screenshot from Adobe highlighting the new Color Labeling option for Collections. |
Lightroom, Adobe’s cloud-centric photography ecosystem, has also gained a few new features in the August update, including the ability to recover deleted photos, improved search options, updated preset options and batch metadata edits. Some of these changes apply only to specific versions of Lightroom, so check out Adobe’s announcement post for full details.
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| Screenshots from Adobe showing off the new batch metadata editing on Lightroom for Android. |
The August Photography update should be available through the Creative Cloud application. Additional details on ‘What’s New’ have been detailed by Adobe for Lightroom Classic, Camera Raw, Lightroom for Mac and Windows, Lightroom for iOS and Lightroom for Android.
Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)