Announcing the February Update to Lightroom Classic

We are pleased to announce the latest update of Lightroom Classic. We have made some significant performance enhancements and added a few key features that will help optimise your photography workflow. When customers talk about performance enhancements, there are generally two categories of improvements requested: Interactive (how quickly the interface responds to your actions) and batch processing (how efficient Lightroom is at utilising system resources and completing batch tasks). This update is focused on batch processing improvements and we’ll continue to focus on both Interactive and Batch Processing improvements going forward.

We have made significant strides with our partners at Intel to optimise CPU and memory usage so that performance will scale better across multiple cores on computers with at least 12 GB of RAM. You should experience improved speed in the following areas:

• Faster import grid loading
• Faster import and preview generation
• Faster walking through images in the Loupe View
• Faster rendering of adjustments in Develop
• Faster merge operations of HDR/Panos
• Faster export

In addition, Lightroom Classic tended to slow down over time for certain customers. We have fixed this issue in most cases, but please let us know if you’re still experiencing the problem.

There was a concern based on early reports of Lightroom 7.2 improvements that we’re only focused on new and expensive high-end hardware. In reality, these enhancements impact a wide range of hardware, Mac and Win, old and new. One key attribute of the enhancements is that they scale appropriately with a customer’s investment in hardware. A common complaint in the past was that a large investment in a new system did not provide equivalent improvements in Lightroom performance. Lightroom 7.2 is an important step forward in addressing that issue, particularly for computers with at least 12 GB of memory. While we’re very pleased with the performance improvements in 7.2, we have lots more planned, and you’ll see ongoing performance improvements in future releases.

We have also added the following enhancements based on your feature requests:

Folder Search

Much like the ability to search your Collections, you are now able to find a specific Folder via text search.

You also now have the option to filter Favourites within Folders. You can tag the folder as a favourite, by right-clicking the folder and select “Mark Favourite”. The folder will have a star icon next to it to signify it is now a Favourite Folder, which you can now filter for.

This makes it easy to replicate your folders as collections so that you can sync them with Lightroom mobile. When right-clicking on a Folder, the context menu command “Create Collection Set” will replicate the Folder hierarchy as a Collection and Collection Set hierarchy.

Easily add all of the photos from a specific location to a Collection. Simply right-click on any pin or group of pins on the Map and choose “Create Collection”.

Now you can quickly find photos that are edited, or unedited, by selecting “Edit” in the Library Filters Metadata browser.

We have also added the ability to create smart collections based off images with edits in them. When you go to create a Smart Collection, click on the filter “Develop”, then “Has Edits.” Has Edits includes images with adjustments and/or have been cropped.

In addition to the performance improvements described above, we have enabled the Photoshop Continuously Scalable User Interface feature in the ACR plugin, limiting the scaling to 100% or 200%. 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 Windows OS determines which actual scale factors are available. On Windows, per-monitor scaling is now supported. This means that in a multi-monitor setup, each monitor can be set to a different scale factor and ACR will display accordingly.

For more about these new features, and to see a list of fixed bugs, please check out, What’s New in Lightroom Classic.

You can also check out the latest camera_ and lens profile support as well_