Lightroom Ver. 12 and ACR Ver. 15 Updates
Adobe recently released a major update for their software packages Lightroom and ACR (Adobe Camera Raw). These bring in substantial improvements to enhance the ease of use by employing advanced AI (Artificial Intelligence) technology.
Lightroom er. 12 as the latest version is called, added support for some newly released cameras and also made a few enhancements to the Library module. The most useful one is that when we import a folder, the names of the parent folders are also displayed. The search engine has also been enhanced and now you can find images taken on a particular date by giving year, month and day of the month.
The most significant improvements are, however, in the Develop module and the same were also introduced in the
er.15 of ACR. Let us look at these in more detail.
Please note that we are using screen captures of Lightroom for our article. Those of ACR ersion 15, will be similar. To understand why these improvements are so noteworthy, let us start with the tool strip. This is located just below the histogram on the right panel and has the following tools (Picture 1). From, left to right:
1. Edit
2. Crop Overlay 3. Healing Tool 4. Red Eye Correction 5. Masking
This tool strip looks very similar to the earlier ( ersion 11) one except for the
icon on the extreme left, called Edit.
This is rather simple to use. If you are using any one of the other tools (2 to 5) from the tool strip, then clicking on this will take you to the global edit tool group immediately.
There are no changes made to the
Crop Overlay or Red Eye Correction tools. The Spot Removal tool has been improved and has been given a new name and is called the Healing tool. The icon remains the same but the features have been enhanced. Once you click on it, you will see three icons under Mode (Picture 2, green arrow).
These are (Picture 2, yellow arrow) from left to right Content-Aware Remove,
Heal, and Clone tools. Of these, the latter two are the same as before but the former is new and as per Adobe uses AI technology. It is similar to the ContentAware Fill tool in Photoshop. To use it, click on the Content-Aware Remove in the Mode section (leftmost, Picture 2) and simply paint over the area that you want to remove. Lightroom will automatically find the best part (called source) within the image and uses this to
remove and blend the area you marked. You can also override and choose the source area yourself. We found this tool to work extremely well and highly recommend that you use it.
One more change is that when you used these tools and selected the areas by painting over them, a white nontransparent overlay obscured the image beneath. This has now been replaced with a white bounding line that does not hide the image. Once again, a positive change. The sliders are unchanged.
Now, let us look at the big changes. These are in the area of masking but the icon has not been changed. To understand what changes have been introduced, it is best to know what we have till now. In the earlier versions, you had the tools to
create masks such as the linear gradient, circular gradient, and brush. There was also a provision to use range masks based on colour or luminance. ersion 11, introduced last year brought two significant tools – Select Subject and
Select Sky. Both worked with a click and selected the subject or sky respectively as the names indicate.
Another important feature that was present all along was that you could add, subtract or intersect the existing mask with any other masking tool thus greatly enhancing the flexibility. You could also copy or invert the mask. All these features have been retained in the new version.
These apart, ersion 12 has greatly enhanced the masking features. Clicking on the masking icon will show a completely new window (Picture 3). From this, you can observe that you now have the Background and
Objects masking tools that were not present earlier.
Earlier if you wanted to select the background you would have to select the sky first, then invert it, and then perhaps refine it using other tools. These steps can be avoided if you use the
Background tool. In practice, however, we did not find it to be very useful since it had difficulty in choosing what the background was. It was functioning more as an inverted subject selection tool. Some more testing may be needed to decipher its working.
The Objects tool is a near clone of the Object Selection tool in Photoshop. Once you invoke this, you will see a screen (Picture 4). To use this tool, you need to demarcate the object you want to select. You can do this in two ways depending on the Mode you have chosen. If you have chosen Brush Select, you need to roughly paint over the area (this is highlighted by an overlay). You can also change the size of the brush. The other way to demarcate the area is to choose the Rectangle Select tool and draw a rectangle bounding box (Picture 5) around the object you want to select.
Once demarcation is done either way Lightroom will find the object within that area and create a mask (Picture 6). We found that this tool works well and is extremely useful as it makes the selection process very precise and at the same time much easier.
The selection of people has been taken to a whole new level in this version with an extraordinary level of flexibility. Look at the bottom of the Masking tool screen (Picture 3), you will find the following –
People No people found
What this means is that Lightroom was trying to detect people and did not find any in the image. What if people are there in the image? This can be best explained using a screenshot (Picture 7). Here, you have a scene on the left with two people and the right side shows the Masking tool panel. Compare the masking panels of Pictures 3 and 7. In the latter case, Lightroom detected two people. This is done all by itself automatically once the Masking tool is selected and no user intervention is requiredǨ
Once this detection is completed, you will see new icons under People (Picture 7). The number of People icons displayed will depend on the number of people detected. The first icon All people appears when at least two persons are detected. The next icons show the faces of the detected people. Here, they are two such icons since two people (named Person 1 and Person 2) were detected. Note that there are some people in the background but they were ignored, probably because they are in the background and not sharp. It is that smartǨ
We would think that selecting ‘All
people’ should mask all the people and selecting the next icons should mask the individuals. However, Lightroom goes well beyond thatǨ As an example, I have selected Person 2 by clicking on the corresponding icon. Here is what you will see (Picture 8).
You can observe that Lightroom has simply not masked the entire person but has given the option to mask the person fully via the option Entire Person or as separate human features listed here. The latter will depend on what features
Lightroom was able to detect in a person in the image. For example:
Ȉ Face Skin Ȉ Body Skin Ȉ Eyebrows Ȉ Eye Sclera Ȉ Iris and Pupil Ȉ Lips Ȉ Hair
You can see that we can mask the entire person or a feature or any combination of the features from the list. The advantage is that each feature can be selected by a separate mask and can be developed differently. For example, body skin and face skin can be processed in different ways or the Iris and pupil can be made darker while the sclera can be made brighter, hair can be given more texture while face skin can be smoother, and so on. This type of precise masking can make portrait retouching infinitely easier.
You may recall the Adaptive Presets that use AI technology were introduced previously. These were based on Select Sky and Select Subject masking tools and allowed applying presets only to
certain areas of the image. This version adds Adaptive Portrait presets to the two already existing ones, viz., Adaptive Sky and Adaptive Subject presets.
We have given here a brief overview of some of the important enhancements introduced in the update, like Content Aware Remove and new Masking features. There are several others too and we could not cover all of those due to space constraints. If you want to have a look at these, open Lightroom, go to the main menu,
Help > What’s New
This will take you to a webpage where all the new features of the latest release are listed.
We also noticed one difference between Lightroom er. 12 and ACR er. 15.0. In both, after masking is done, you can develop the image using several sliders like Exposure, Contrast, Texture, etc. However, in ACR er. 15.0, you can also use the Curves tool. This feature is not available in Lightroom currently but we are sure that it will be added in the next release.