Adobe Camera Raw 19

To start, Adobe has announced ACR 19, a new major version of its Raw editing software. As usual it adds support for new cameras (in this release, just the ones on the Apple iPhone Duo) and lenses, but the company also updated its “Glow” tool to let it emulate some trendy looks.

Mitchell Clark

Previously, it let you add things like bloom and halation to your image. Now, it can also let you add “motion,” which streaks the light in your image in a customizable direction, as if you were doing a shutter drag, as well as “streak,” which emulates the look you’d get if you were shooting at point light sources with an anamorphic lens (or if your standard lens were a little smudgy). Both effects are customizable, letting you choose the direction of the streaks and make them a bit more or less subtle, depending on your preferences.

The update also allows you to use the tool’s powerful noise reduction on a wider array of file types. When it was introduced, you could only use it with Raws, but now, you can use it with JPEGs, HEIFs, PNGs, WebPs and more. This also means you can use Denoise from the Camera Raw filter within Photoshop.

ACR now also supports the use of industry-standard Look Up Tables, or LUTs, for color grading. These have been common in the video world for a long time now, so there are a lot of them out there, and they’ve recently become more popular among photographers who want to be able to quickly apply a certain look to their photos without having to do a bunch of manual adjustments. Camera Raw will let you stack up to three of them, and adjust how strongly they’re applied.

Beyond the new creative tools, ACR also gains several organizational upgrades. You can now create “virtual copies,” letting you do different edits to the same photo without having to actually have duplicate files. ACR can also automatically create “Stacks” of burst photos from “recent Canon, Nikon, and DNG-supported camera models,” grouping together shots taken in rapid succession to prevent your thumbnail view from filling up with near-identical shots.

Speaking of keeping your view clean, ACR also lets you temporarily hide photos from your filmstrip or grid view, getting rid of them for the session, but showing them again the next time you open it.

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Finally, Adobe is making it easier to use its Generative Remove tool across multiple photos at once. If you have a set of images with the same object you’d like to erase, you can mark it to be removed and have the app automatically churn through them, replacing the object with what it thinks should be there.

Lightroom

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The flagship update to the Creative Cloud version of Lightroom that Adobe didn’t mention in its keynote is a new, more customizable user interface, which lets you “personalize the color, contrast, size and style of the Lightroom interface elements, and create your own custom panel of favorite Edit controls.” Upon opening the updated app for the first time, it lets you choose between presets designed for “new and existing users,” “power users,” and “longtime users,” which you can either adopt wholesale or customize.

Adobe also says its Assisted Culling feature has “more accurate photo evaluation,” which presumably means it’ll be better at picking out which images should be keepers. You’re also now able to save multiple versions of a photo whether you’re working on an image stored locally or in the cloud, and you have more range to make white balance adjustments. The

Lightroom Classic, meanwhile, now lets you filter images while importing them based on their color label, file type or whether they’re locked. It also gains the autofocus point overlay from ACR, which works for selected cameras.

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There are a variety of smaller fixes and improvements that are available across both versions of Lightroom. There’s now a vectorscope view, giving you another option for visualizing your color and brightness information, and there’s a projection adjustment for fixing wide-angle lens distortion. Finally, the company says it’s improved the “Depth Range Masking” feature by letting it generate a depth map for photos that don’t already have one.

Photoshop and upcoming attractions

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While Adobe highlighted a handful of things in Photoshop in its keynote and corresponding press announcements, it turns out that wasn’t the extent of the changes to the photo editing app. During a demo with Stephen Nielson, Senior Director of Product Management at Adobe Photoshop, Abby Ferguson learned that the entire UI of Photoshop is new, albeit subtly so. Everything is slightly darker, with adjustments to icons and spacing, and added roundness to various elements. (I.e., the tabs actually look like tabs now.) Nielson said they wanted to make the tools easier to read and see, as they get feedback from users that things are very cramped and hard to make out.

Another subtle UI change that will be appreciated by many: you no longer have to click and hold on the left sidebar to see all the tools in that stack. Instead, you can just hover over an item to see them all.

Additionally, some features are coming to the beta version of the app. Nielson said that there’s a new engine that will make it much faster and more responsive. It’s currently an optional change you have to turn on, but he says it’s very powerful. Lastly, the beta version of Photoshop also has a new Light Leak filter, which Nielsen says uses no AI whatsoever. There are different looks to choose from, all of which add that film-age streak of light across your images.