[Rand Scott Adams]

Adobe Lightroom & Adobe Camera Raw

on: June 13, 2023 at 1:34 pm

Adobe keeps hitting it out of the park, IMO. In today’s release (12.4) they’ve “fixed” (to my way of thinking) the curves panel that is available in the Develop Module and (more important) in masks. I was disappointed in the long anticipated addition of curves to masks, in that the concomitant increase in saturation along with contrast was way over the top. Now, when you are using an RGB curve (as opposed to either R G or B individually) there will appear at the bottom a “Refine Sat.” slider. 100 is their current default in added saturation, and zero is no saturation added at all (like Luminosity mode in PS on a curves layer). Hurrah!

Also, now in the HSL panel, if you are using the tat tool, if you hold down Alt/Opt while adjusting it will gray out all but the color range being affected. Hurrah again.

And, there are also now the grain sliders for masks.

Nice going Adobe!

Rand

Rand Scott Adams Rand47

• This topic was modified 1 year, 2 months ago by Rand Scott Adams.

[Mark D Segal Silver Member Posts: 951]

Re: Lightroom update 6-13-23 Version 12.4

Reply #1 on: June 13, 2023 at 1:49 pm

Yes Rand, you’re right, it’s good that they are introducing these improvements. But there are other things which persistently don’t happen. For example, (1) users have been asking them to make the panels detachable so that we can customize our work-spaces to taste, as possible with Capture One (and indeed Photoshop) since as ever far back as I can remember. (2) In the print module, Custom page layouts, they’ve been asked to make the guidelines more distinct and enable use of the arrow keys to nudge the photos exactly into place. Neither have happened, yet they shouldn’t be all that technically difficult to implement. Anyhow, I suppose they get thousands of requests for this and that and just need to prioritize. That said, this has become a truly fantastic image editor. The new masking features in particular are incredibly good and make light of work that used to be quite demanding when it had to be done in Photoshop.

[Rand Scott Adams]

Re: Lightroom update 6-13-23 Version 12.4

Reply #2 on: June 13, 2023 at 2:24 pm

Mark,
No arguments from me. You can re-order the top to bottom menu panels now, which helps, but it’s a far cry from true customization.
And in the Print Module I wish the page layout line colors were different between the “margins” lines and the “cell size” lines. And, as you well say, trying to use Custom page layouts w/o the ability to accurately move the individual images via some kind of “nudge” is frustrating in the extreme. So much so that I often just take the images into Photo shop and drag them as new layers into a document the size of my desired print, then nudge them about to my heart’s content! LOL
Rand

Rand Scott Adams Rand47

• This reply was modified 1 year, 2 months ago by Rand Scott Adams.

[Jeremy Roussak Gold Member Posts: 1062]

Re: Lightroom update 6-13-23 Version 12.4

Reply #3 on: June 21, 2023 at 2:03 pm

Rand Scott Adams wrote:

Also, now in the HSL panel, if you are using the tat tool, if you hold down Alt/Opt while adjusting it will gray out all but the color range being affected. Hurrah again

That is indeed fantastically useful.

I agree also that the print module could do with some love. Auto print length, for example? Ah well. Maybe next year.

Jeremy

[Mark D Segal Silver Member Posts: 951]

Re: Lightroom update 6-13-23 Version 12.4

Reply #4 on: June 21, 2023 at 2:14 pm

I don’t expect we’ll get auto print length, because that depends very much on interplay with printer drivers, of which there are quite a few different ones.

[Jeremy Roussak Gold Member Posts: 1062]

Re: Lightroom update 6-13-23 Version 12.4

Reply #5 on: June 21, 2023 at 2:16 pm

Perhaps. But QImage seems to handle it without noticeable difficulty.

Jeremy

[Richard Marcellus Participant Posts: 2]

Re: Lightroom update 6-13-23 Version 12.4

Reply #6 on: June 21, 2023 at 10:41 pm

I’m making the switch to LRC from many years using C1P. The fantastic new AI masking in LR/LRC and other AI features that are showing up has convinced me. I hadn’t noticed some of the previous improvement too, like the C1P style colour grading. I was always paying for LR/LRC with the Adobe Photography Plan (to get Photoshop), but decided that paying for a C1P subscription on top of this would not be worth it.

LR (cloud) is also looking really improved from what I remember a few years back. It doesn’t seem to be missing much from LRC. Once I get settled in to LRC I may continue the migration to LR as I would like the peace of mind to have cloud backup and syncing with my iPadPro and iPhone.

The migration is likely to be painful, but it is giving me an excuse to go through all my old images for culling and reprocessing of forgotten gems.

Richard

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