This meeting will be a Lightroom training session led by a PACC Club member (see below for specific person leading this workshop). In each workshop the leader will select several features or tools within Lightroom to describe, demonstrate and answer questions about. For the most part these topics will be for Lightroom Classic however some Lighroom CC (cloud based) topics may be included. Within Lightroom Classic, most topics will be from the Library, Develop, and Print modules however other modules may be included from time to time.
Feel free to email the leader at least 4 days ahead of the meeting to suggest topics. Lead time of more than 4 days is greatly appreciated.
Specific topics for this meeting will be added to this announcement as they become known but will usually not be known till a few days before the meeting.
Leader for this specific meeting will be Dan Hartford (PACC Digital Chair) who can be contacted with topic suggestions.
TOPICS FOR THIS WORKSHOP
new features OF LrC/13.0 and the sections of the Lightroom Tutorial which have been updated to include information on the new or changed features.
LIGHTROOM/CLOUD DESKTOP APPS
Even though I typically don’t pay much attention to the cloud based Lightroom apps, with this release they did implement something quite interesting. I have NOT really played with this myself much but you may find it of note. Within the cloud based desktop apps (Lightroom desktop for Mac or Windows), there is now an option for “Local Storage”. In the past the Lightroom (cloud) apps stored the originals in the Adobe Cloud but allowed you to cache a copy of what was in the cloud on the local device probably as smart previews. By doing this you could work on images without an internet connection and didn’t have to wait for each image to download from the cloud each time you wanted to work on it. With this new release there is a feature that allows you to store your full size original files on your local computer and Lightroom (Cloud) will consider the locally stored version of those files as the originals. This seems to be more or less a parallel mode of operation in the SW where you toggle the application between dealing with a set of Local files vs. dealing with a set Cloud based files and as far as I know you can’t do both at the same time. In other words, when in ‘local’ mode, from a file management perspective it is like LR/Classic but uses LR/Cloud tools and interface.
LIGHTROOM/CLASSIC FEATURES
There are several minor things which I’ll get to, but the two big ticket items are a new “Lens blur” panel and support of “HDR editing”.
NEW CATALOG FORMAT
LrC/13.0 requires a catalog update. This means that when you install this version of LrC, it will request to update your catalog to be compatible with the new version of LrC.
LENS BLUR
Lens blur has two sides to it. First of all if your image does not have a depth map provided by the camera (Like HEIC files from iPhones) it will use AI to analyze the image pixels and create a depth map for the image. The second side is that using the depth map, you can add blur to portions of the image based on that depth map by selecting the depth ranges that you want to protect (i.e. not blur) and then allowing you to apply blur to the other depth ranges. In addition rather then manually selecting the depth range to protect you can tell it to protect either the subject which uses AI to determine what the subject is in the image (similar to same feature in masking) or pick a range in the image by drawing a box. For the blur itself, you can pick from 5 different kinds of blur to mimic different kinds of Bokeh.
This feature is being included as an “Early Access” feature. In the past Adobe has only distributed Early Access features in separate “beta” or “preview” releases that you’d have to install separately, however this one is included in the production release. Maybe their changing how they do these. The general interpretation of this designation is that they intend to change how it works or how it is presented in the not too distant future and the tool has a button where you can tell Adobe what you think.
HDR EDIT MODE
This major new feature allows you to expand the tonal range on images from 8 to 10 bits per color channel. This expanded data can be seen on monitors which support HDR (how much depends on the monitor and graphics card) and can be saved when exporting to certain file types. Like an octopus, HDR edit mode has tentacles in many different areas of LrC.
Basic Panel – is where you turn on HDR edit mode. However, once you turn on HDR edit mode for an image the sliders are now affecting a larger (up to 4 stop larger) tonal range. In this mode 100% is up to 4 stops brighter than it is in SDR mode. In this mode the Basic Panel also gets a 2nd set of tonal sliders which are used when the image is displayed on an SDR (rather than HDR) monitor. These 2nd set of sliders are used to bring the tonal range back down to what an SDR monitor can display. In addition to visualizing clipping highlights, in the Basic Panel you can turn on “Visualize HDR” which puts a color overlay on the image where the color depends on which HDR zone those pixels are in (SDR Zone, and then each stop within the HDR zone has its own color).
Export Dialog - The File Settings section of the Export Dialog now includes an “HDR” checkbox when certain file types are selected as the output file type. If this checkbox is on, then the exported file contains the expanded tonal ranges but if it is off the exported file does not contain these expanded ranges
Histogram – Both the Library and Develop module histograms have changed their look but more importantly when in HDR Edit mode, they are split into two sections with the SDR tonal range on the left and HDR tonal range on the right, There is also a colored line along the bottom of the histogram which indicates if your current monitor can display pixels in each tonal zone. You can now also toggle between RGB values and % readouts in the Develop module version.
Tone Curve – When editing in HDR mode, like the Histogram, the tone curves now expand by 4 stops to include the expanded HDR tonal range with a line down the middle to show the boundary between the SDR zone and the expanded HDR zones
Preferences – There is a new preference that will automatically turn on HDR Edit mode or any image that becomes the active image in the Develop Module and has HDR data (Like DNG’s created from “Merge to HDR”)
Sync settings - The sync settings dialog box has new check boxes for “HDR Mode” and “SDR Preview”
POINT COLOR
Point Color is a new way to select pixels to alter. This is similar to the HSL and COLOR panels as well as Color Range Masking but in the case of Point Color you pick the color(s) by clicking on your image to select a color and then can fiddle with how close a match to the clicked on color to also include. The added advantage with Point Color is that you can use Saturation and Luminance ranges in addition of Hue when determining the range of pixels to affect. For example, if you pick a skin tone hue, you can also limit the selection to only the portions of that color that are darker such as being shaded by a hat.
HOVER OVER
When you hover your mouse over a preset, snapshot, or history step, the image in the central area can now show that state.
NEW EXPORT FILE TYPES
Can now export using file type AVIF and JPG XL
NEW COLOR SPACES
LrC now supports new color spaces when editing, opening, or exporting an image in HDR mode:
• HDR sRGB (Rec. 709) has the smallest color gamut
• HDR P3
• HDR Rec. 2020 has the largest Gamut of the 3
These are HDR-enabled versions of the existing sRGB, Display P3, and Rec. 2020 color spaces.
DEFERRED AI MODEL DOWNLOAD
In prior versions of LrC the AI masking models used to figure out what the AI is looking for (like “Object” or “People”) were included during the installation of LrC. As of LrC/13 these masking models are no longer included when LrC is installed. When a user clicks on one of these mask types the model is at that time downloaded from the Adobe Servers and placed into a folder on the users system for future use. From then on the copy on the users local computer will be used unless a new version of the model is available from Adobe at which time the process is repeated. If a new mask model version is required, you will see a message while the new version is being downloaded. Starting with LrC/12.4, they started pre-downloading these models and saving them in their folder for future use so most of them should already be available to you without needing to be re-downloaded.