June 2021 Photography releases

Image source: San Francisco Skyline, Benjamin Warde.

The latest release of the Adobe Photography lineup brings a huge update to Lightroom’s collaboration features, as well as a whole set of gorgeous new Premium Presets, handcrafted for us by some of today’s most talented photographers. Plus, a whole host of other feature improvements to streamline your workflow and improve your editing.

Premium Presets (ACR, Lightroom Classic, Lightroom Mac/Win, iOS, Android, Web)

All of the Adobe Photography applications now include a new set of Premium presets, spectacularly high-quality edit presets created by a diverse and talented set of contemporary photographers. This initial set of Premium Presets includes presets in seven different categories: Portraits-Deep Skin, Portraits-Medium Skin, Portraits-Light Skin, Cinematic, Futuristic, Vintage, and Travel. Best of all, we’ll be adding to this Premium preset collection with additional releases in the future.

For more details about Premium presets, and the photographers who created them, check out this blog post.

Edit Collaboration (Lightroom Mac/Win, iOS, Android, Web)

Lightroom’s cloud connection has always made sharing photos easy, and previous releases have allowed you to easily invite people to view the photos in an album and even allow others to contribute their own photos to an album. The latest release of Lightroom now enables you to also invite other people to edit the photos in an album.

People who you explicitly invite will now be able to edit the photos in an album that you share with them, and their edits will appear right in your Lightroom library. Everyone’s edits are automatically saved as Versions, labeled with the editor’s name, so you can easily switch between edits from different editors, or revert to earlier edits.

Super Resolution (Lightroom Classic, Lightroom Mac/Win)

Introduced this past March in Adobe Camera Raw, Super Resolution is now available in Lightroom and Lightroom Classic as well. Super Resolution uses artificial intelligence to increase the resolution of your photo 4X with spectacularly accurate results. Imagine turning a 10-megapixel photo into a 40-megapixel photo. Imagine upsizing an old photo taken with a low-resolution camera in order to make a large print. Imagine having an advanced “digital zoom” feature to enlarge your subject. There are a lot of possibilities here!

For a deeper dive into Super Resolution, check out this blog post from ACR engineer Eric Chan.

Apple Silicon Native (Lightroom Classic)

Lightroom Classic now runs natively on Macs with the new M1 chip, and it is fast! The combination of the M1-optimized Lightroom Classic, and Apple’s newest M1 computers results in fantastic speed improvements. When compared to an equivalent Intel Mac, most operations in Lightroom Classic on an M1 Mac are about twice as fast, including launch, import, export, and walking through photos in loupe view. Other operations are even faster — the new Super Resolution feature is more than three times as fast, and batch editing photos is more than four times as fast. For more detailed information on the performance improvements, check out these detailed, third party testing results.

Tethered Live View for Nikon (Lightroom Classic)

Photographers using Tethered Capture aren’t always in reach of their viewfinders when capturing that perfect shot. With Live View, you can now see your camera’s real-time feed in Lightroom Classic to nail your composition, focus, and exposure settings. This feature is especially valuable when collaborating with teams behind the screen. Tethered Live View is now available for certain Nikon cameras, see the complete list of supported cameras here.

Custom Crop Aspect Ratios (Lightroom Mac/Win)

OK, let’s be honest, this one has been a long time coming. In previous releases, Lightroom only allowed you to select from a predetermined list of aspect ratios when cropping. (Or you could crop to any aspect ratio freehand, but that makes it tricky to achieve a specific aspect ratio.) As of the latest release of Lightroom you can now numerically specify whatever crop aspect ratio you wish. 2.4 x 7.3, anyone?