If you haven’t already heard, Adobe Lightroom CC is now available, and it has some significant improvements.
Before we get to the improvements, though, let’s just acknowledge that the Adobe CC system is horrible. It’s a buggy mess. On my end, the Creative Cloud app didn’t inform me of an update… in fact, it wouldn’t let me update… until I rebooted my computer. Then, after installing Lightroom CC, I clicked the program icon (and the menu item) to launch it, and nothing happened. Nothing. No new process showed up in the task manager. I tried to “Run as Administrator” to no avail. No error message, even. Just nothing. I rebooted. Nothing. I uninstalled and re-installed. Nothing.
What finally worked? Logging out of the Adobe Creative Cloud application, and then logging back in. Adobe, you’re a jerk.
But when it finally opened, I was happy with what I found. These are the major updates:
- Facial Recognition in your image library
- Improved processing speed
- Merge images to panorama
- HDR processing, saving as 16-bit DNG file
- Video slideshows from still images
- Lightroom Mobile is now available for Android devices, as well as Apple
I’m especially impressed with the ability to create panoramas as DNG files from RAW images; essentially, this means that they remain RAW files, rather than JPGs, and the panorama can be adjusted with the same flexibility as RAW images.
You can purchase a subscription for Lightroom and Photoshop CC for $10/month, though there is a one-year contract.
