Adobe Lightroom Adds Video "Editing" And More AI

Adobe has announced new updates for its Lightroom photo editing software. It’s the time of year where the children are out of school, vacation and travel time is picking up and more images will be snapped with your favorite camera of choice. Perfect time to get the most out of your photos and videos with updated editing tools. Here’s a quick look at some of the Lightroom updates announced.

Image: Adobe

Video Processing

You’ve been able to add video files to Lightroom for a handful of years now. Granted, I didn’t see much use for it, personally, but the capability was there. You couldn’t really do an “edit” to the video file if you needed to. Even something as simple as shorten the video. Makes sense considering Adobe offers several other video editing options with its Premiere Pro,* Premiere Rush* and After Effects* software. Now you can import video files to do some very light retouching as well as trim the video. You can’t create video with multiple clips are anything like that, but if you’re trying to retouch a single file, you can do so. This of it how you’d use the native photos app on your iPhone or Android device. There’s usually a simple video touch up option in it. This is the same as that, just with Adobe tools and AI included. This update is available for Lightroom, Lightroom on mobile and also Lightroom Classic.

AI Mask Controls

Adobe’s Sensei AI has continued to get better over the years to help speed up the post-processing workflow. The mask tool in Lightroom is useful for doing selective adjustments. Now you can create a mask in a photo and apply the same type of selection as well as the parameters to another photo in your group. So if you’re trying to do a selective adjustment on a person to, but would like to apply the same processing to a product shot, you can with copy and paste. The AI will recognize the subject of each image and process accordingly without you needing to adjust your selection.

Image: Adobe

GPU EXPORT!!!!

Also in this update, Lightroom Classic has been rewritten to export utilizing the GPU on your system where applicable. This is BIG and should give a boost in performance.

More information about the updates such as adaptive presets, red-eye removal and more can be found on the official Adobe blog post. Get the Adobe Photography package for just $9.99 a month* with my affiliate link to step up your photography processing game as well as help support me and my efforts.

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Photoshop on the Web? Yes Please: Adobe Max 2021 Announcements

Happy Adobe Max Day, everyone. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know I come off as a huge fanboy. So be it. I like what I like and the Adobe Creative Cloud subscription* works for me for most things I do in my day-to-day professional life. With that said, Adobe began its annual conference aimed to educate and inspire the content creators of the world. The keynote presentation is always noteworthy with some big updates to its software offerings. Let’s take a look at those new updates.

Photoshop Is Pretty Much Everywhere

The Adobe Sensei AI engine continues to improve as it will offer more tools to help speed up the photo post-processing workflow with just a few clicks. Creating selections in Photoshop gets easier as you can now hover over objects and preview what a selection would be in your artwork. There’s also more neural filters in place to help with enhancing landscape images beyond sky replacements. Lightroom also gets some new AI love. What excites me the most is a forth-coming (beta) Photoshop web interface with the help of a more collaborative Creative Cloud. This is all about speeding up the collaboration process as well as aid in helping train up someone you’re mentoring. Collaborators can use the browser to do some basic editing or provide feedback to the artist. No Creative Cloud account required for the collaborator. More on this beta and other photography app updates is available here on the Adobe blog.

Image: Adobe

Slick Update for Vloggers in Premiere Pro

Premiere Pro has had a few updates earlier in the year pointing towards performance and useful tools for your final video composition. Let’s face it, video is becoming more and more prominent the world of communication and branding. Platforms like YouTube and TikTok will favor your videos if you have certain behind-the-scenes elements in place with your workflow in addition to creating captivating stories to keep your viewers on their platform. Vloggers and film makers will love the updates. As a vlogger wanting to have music bed in their video, but the music track doesn’t quite match the length of the video. It’s a horrible experience to try to tastefully trim music to a video with cuts and trimming of the audio track. Now audio remix, which is found in Adobe Audition, is available in Premiere Pro. This is a great tool in Audition. Good news is this is coming to Premiere Pro. Bad news is this is a beta release.

Image: Adobe

Another useful update is the “simplified timeline” AI that’s available in Premiere Pro. This is yet another tool aimed at making collaboration more efficient. For some, a video sequence timeline can become quite messy when piecing together tracks, effects and markers. If the project is a team project, it may be helpful to minimize all the extraneous markers and layers when a collaborator is reviewing the sequence. Simplified Timeline does just that without destroying the project. This feature is available in the new update. More on the video updates from Adobe can be found here.

There are other updates available to the Creative Cloud suite this week. In Design, Illustrator, Character Animator and more received updates. I didn’t get into them all because, I don’t use those apps as often. But if you’re interested, more news on the all the Adobe updates can be found here on the Adobe blog.

Did you sign up for Adobe Max? I hope so. It’s FREE and full of information to help you better understand some creative concepts and fundamentals, as well as get a better grip on the Creative Cloud suite of apps.

(*) Affiliate link used. When you use my affiliate links, I receive a small commission from your purchase at no additional cost to you as the consumer. Thank you for your support

Better Masking and Selections Coming to Adobe Lightroom and ACR

Adobe Lightroom Classic is part of my photography workflow for post-processing as well as organizing and cataloging my files. The tools in post-processing have become second nature for me these days. Now Adobe is adding more capability to Lightroom Classic, Lightroom (Cloud) and Camera Raw apps with it’s precise masking tool.

The tool is going to offer more flexibility when using the adjustment brush to do selective adjustments in your image. Depending on what you’re trying to achieve, some selective adjustments can be quite tedious in Lightroom. Which is why I usually switch to Photoshop for that part of my post-processing. But it’s nice to see that this may save me a few minutes of work by keeping me in Lightroom.

More details about the update can be found here on the Adobe blog. Check out this quick video showing off forth-coming tool.

Adobe Continues Performance Boost for M1 Macs

Coming off the heels of WWDC, Adobe announces more updates for its Creative Cloud product line. Specifically, those compatible with the Apple M1 silicon. A lot of the products have been supported for a little while with others still being in beta status, but today some performance updates were announced.

Performance Boosted

Adobe teamed up with Pheiffer Report to take a look at performance of the Creative Cloud apps running on M1 Macs from Apple. The test hardware included the M1 Macbook Pro (16GB RAM), Intel Core i5 Macbook Pro (16GB RAM) where both were connected to an Apple Pro Display XDR. Lots of benchmarking test were completed looking at Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and more focusing on not only the simple use of the user interface (UI), but also some graphic-heavy or CPU-intensive functions of each app. It’s found that on average, the Creative Cloud apps are 80% faster using the M1 systems. Pretty impressive. Adobe and Pheiffer had a bunch of charts and information here showing all the details of the testing.

With that said, the video editor for Adobe, Premiere Pro, is still in beta status. I’ve not heard anything bad about the beta other than a few “quirks,” but it’s believed that the beta runs circles around the Intel version on performance.

Better Collaboration Tools and More Tools for Lightroom

I tend to focus more on the photography side of things when it comes to the Creative Cloud. Yes, I use Premiere, and After Effects, but I open Lightroom and Photoshop more often. Unfortunately, I’m not on an M1 so I don’t see these particular performance boosts. But Adobe has added more ways to collaborate on the photography front with cloud collaboration capability. This allows you to get an extra set of eyes on your photos project and tweak the editing before clicking “post” to Instagram or whatever your platform of choice is.

Image by Adobe

Far as the editing tools, the AI tool found in Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) which enabled you to convert an image to a much higher resolution image is now available in Lightroom Classic as well as Lightroom. This Super Resolution feature touts increasing your photog resolution by up to 4X. In my experience, the previous iteration was “ok.” Wasn’t great, but it did make a difference.

Adobe has a lot more information on its blog regarding the updates for Lightroom, Photoshop with its new custom brushes, Illustrator and more. I guess I better get myself ready to install these updates as well as find a way to get my hands on an M1 Mac. Ha!

Adobe Gives Props To Some Up and Coming Photographers

Adobe has been giving recognition and props to up and coming photographers around the world for the last four years. Today it featured this year’s noteworthy photographers. All with not only a beautiful portfolio to their credit, but also fascinating back stories.

I’m not going to share any of the photographers’ images here. I’d rather you click through on the image below to see them on Adobe’s blog. The photographers are:

Lia Clay Miller - The first trans woman to photograph a back-to-back cover for Out Magazine.

Andrew Morócho – An Ecuadorian photographer on a mission to empower BIPOC empathetically by evoking strength in feeling, through use of color and symbolism

Lara Jackson – A wildlife photographer and devoted conservation biologist who aims to share important conservation success stories.

Now-a-days, there’s ample time to learn a new craft or skill. Photography is one of them. Photography is so much more accessible now. Smartphones are the gateway. If you’ve been curious about photography, I say start now. You’ve got nothing to lose. Heck, maybe you’ll be featured by Adobe one day.

Image via Adobe