How Premiere Could be Great at Color

Adobe Premiere Pro has been aggressively pursuing the creative editorial market at all levels, from feature films to YouTube. It’s now where I do all my cutting, and even finishing. Yes, that’s right, my age-old advice to finish in After Effects instead of an NLE is well and truly obsolete. Premiere renders with great quality, and any tools I felt were missing from the pipeline I’ve created myself.

Part of Premiere’s ascendancy has included folding in the color features of SpeedGrade, exactly as I advised back in 2011. The result, the Lumetri color panel, is a perfectly serviceable color corrector. Of course I prefer Magic Bullet Colorista, but that’s not what I want to talk about here. There are actually quite a few things that Premiere could do to be amazing at color that have nothing to do with Lumetri.

ICC Display Color Management

I bet most Premiere editors are using their computer monitor as their primary display for the Program panel. Sure, ideally you’d be using additional video hardware and a calibrated broadcast monitor, but color matters to everyone, not just those editing for broadcast.

Color managed red in After Effects on the left, non-color-managed red in Premiere on the right.

My consumer-grade iMac has a wide-gamut display, so colors in Premiere look way too saturated. After Effects has solved this handily, and colors there very closely match my calibrated OLED display.

Put simply, it’s not good for color grading when your colors look wrong. Premiere should implement display color management, make sure it’s compatible with After Effects, and offer some well-tested color settings for output to YouTube and other increasingly-important non-broadcast platforms.

Stillstore

After Effects has long had this great feature where you can press Shift + F5 to take a snapshot of the comp preview, and then tap F5 to recall it. Better still, F6–8 work the same, for a total of four separate snapshots. The old-school colorist term for this is a “stillstore,” and it’s so essential to good color work that we built it in to Magic Bullet Looks 4.

The Reference Library in Magic Bullet Looks 4.

You need a stillstore or reference image feature for matching shots, for consulting reference, for end-of-day sanity checks, and even just for the good, old-fashioned before-and-after trick. I’d be thrilled if Premiere did this just like After Effects does, but there’s even an opportunity to do it better, with the addition of a split-screen mode, which you'll see about a dozen times per hour in a Resolve color session.

Better Masks

I love showing off the powerful combination of Colorista IV and Premiere’s built-in effects masks. I wish After Effects had the same visually prominent interface to apply masks to effects. But Premiere’s masks have some limitations.

While you can apply multiple masks to an effect, you have no control over how they interact. I’d love to be able to cut a hole in one mask with another, and parent one mask to another’s motion.

If you want to color correct Saturn's rings, but not Saturn, you'll need something other than Premiere.

Premiere’s Masks can be feathered, but it would be useful to be able to vary the feather across the mask. After Effects has this feature, but the implementation is terrible. Premiere has an opportunity here to do something better — and maybe After Effects could adopt the results too.

Faster Mask Tracking

Speaking of masks, it’s great that masks can be tracked in Premiere. With Colorista IV’s keyer and Premiere’s mask tracking, you really needn’t feel like you’re missing out on much capability if you grade in Premiere instead of Resolve. But Premiere’s mask tracking is painfully slow compared to Resolve’s. Simple request: Make it faster.

I tracked a simple mask on a 4k clip in @AdobePremiere and @Blackmagic_News Resolve. pic.twitter.com/73sjEXBsfM

— Stu Maschwitz (@5tu) December 8, 2017

In this demo neither track is great, but my solution would usually be to try the track again in reverse. I could do that quite a few times in Resolve before I'd finished the first track in Premiere.

Color Mode for the Timeline

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Resolve's color timeline.

Here’s a case where Resolve, a color app that has added more and more editorial capability, can lead the way to Premiere, which is working in the opposite direction. When you switch to the Color tab in Resolve, the timeline becomes a series of thumbnails. No durations, no layers, nothing to distract you from the essential task of color work. It’s easy to see how shots are matching up, what other shots might require similar color to the one you’re working on, and so much more. It’s an indispensable visual overview of your color work.

If Premiere intends to take color seriously, it should have a color mode for its timeline. And it could easily beat Resolve at this by color managing the thumbnails, which Resolve does not do.

More Thumbnails. Thumbnails All the Time.

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Me coloring a short for a friend back in the Colorista II days. Thumbnails on the right courtesy of my free DV Rebel Tools.

Viewing your color work as thumbnails is so important that it remains one of the reasons I might still color in After Effects instead of Premiere. For the DV Rebel’s Guide, I created a series of color presets (which Dan Ebberts helped me automate with brilliant scripts) that, among other things, automate the creation of a thumbnail view of your timeline.

Still free after all these years.

Versions

One crucial thing that dedicated color apps like Resolve do is help you manage versions of the color on a shot. If you don’t think this matters, you’ve never graded with a client in the room. But it’s just as useful for solo practitioners.

Premiere could tackle this in a general-purpose way by allowing versions of any effect or set of effects on a clip. That way this could just be an awesome Premiere feature, not just for color work.

Color is More Than a Color Corrector

Notice, as promised, I didn’t mention Lumetri once. There’s much, much more to color work than manipulating a color correction tool. I’m happy that Lumetri exists, and happier still when folks get excited enough about color to move on to Magic Bullet Suite, but the suggestions I’ve made here will help anyone, with any workflow, whether you’re using Lumetri, Colorista, or anything else. One of Premiere’s big advantages is that third-party effects are first-class citizens, so it’s my favorite place to use many of the tools I design.

Premiere has become a great editing tool, and is on its way to becoming a great finishing tool — and I’ll continue to do all I can to support that vision with plug-ins and presets. But there are some things that a plug-in just can’t do. I’m ready for Premiere to get serious about color, and I think the filmmaking and editorial community is too.

Migrating from Lightroom Classic to Lightroom CC, and the Controversy Over Using Them Together: An Exclusive Adobe Q&A

Or, More Accurately, a Transcription of a Therapy Session for Someone Who Wants the New Thing, but Really Would Be Better Off With the Old Thing

In my last Lightroom post, I mentioned that my friend Benjamin Warde is a product manager on the Lightroom team. I’ve known Ben since we were kids, and we’ve long had a mutual love of photography. This is now really handy for me, because I get to ask him whatever questions I want about terrifying, confusing things like migrating 16 years of digital photography from Lightroom Classic to Lightroom CC.

Which, by the way, I’m still not planning on doing soon. But I do plan on doing it eventually, so I asked all the questions I could think to ask, and Benjamin generously allowed me to share his answers here.

And then it got weird.

The Q&A

Hi childhood friend Benjamin Warde!

This part feels like you wrote it for me.

As you know, I’m a longtime Lightroom user, with over 330,000 photos in one master Lightroom Classic catalog. I’ve also been using Lightroom CC on iOS for a while, both for capture and organization, and recently I’ve been using Lightroom CC on my secondary computer, especially when traveling.

So my main Lightroom Classic catalog has a mix of:

1. Photos imported into Lightroom Classic via the “Add” method, i.e. I’m managing their locations myself. They’re on a big external drive. Some of these are in synced Collections and therefore have Smart Previews synced up to Creative Cloud, but most don’t.
2. Photos shot with Lightroom CC for iOS and synced to Creative Cloud.
3. Photos imported into Lightroom CC for Mac and synced to Creative Cloud.

In cases 2 and 3 above, I’ve configured Lightroom Classic to download the originals to a location of my choosing — that same big external drive.

When I eventually do migrate, what I’m aiming for is to get my entire collection of photos, all 335,731 of them, comprising about 4TB, onto Adobe’s Creative Cloud servers with as little disturbance to my workflow as possible. I want Creative Cloud to be my canonical place for all my photos, but given Lightroom CC’s stripped-down approach, I imagine I’ll still want to use Lightroom Classic for some things.

I know that my Lightroom Classic keyword tags won’t sync with Creative Cloud, but when I migrate, will they be converted to keyword tags in Lightroom CC?

Hey, the first one is easy! Yes.

OK, not totally easy. There are some caveats:

There is no keyword hierarchy in Lightroom CC, so your keyword list gets flattened. Picture a keyword hierarchy that looks like this:

• Places
  • California
    • San Jose
  • Costa Rica
    • San Jose

The photos get all the keywords from the hierarchy, so Photo A, with the first “San Jose” applied, would end up with the keywords “Places”, “California”, and “San Jose”. Photo B, with the second “San Jose” applied, would end up with the keywords “Places”, “Costa Rica”, and “San Jose”. But the “San Joses” are not unique in any way. If you search for “San Jose” in Lightroom CC you’ll get both photos in the results. If you wanted to find just Photo B you might try searching for “San Jose” and “Costa Rica” but that won’t help you, because in Lightroom CC a multiple keyword search uses “or” not “and”.

Lightroom Classic has the concept of keyword synonyms, and Lightroom CC does not. If you have a photo in Lightroom Classic tagged “San Francisco” but not with “SF”, but “SF” is set up as a synonym to “San Francisco”, then when the photo is imported into Lightroom CC, it will be tagged with both “San Francisco” and “SF”.

Lightroom Classic has keyword-level controls, such as “do not export”. These are ignored in Lightroom CC.

Luckily I don’t have any hierarchical keywords, because I also don’t alphabetize my recycling.

But I do have a ton of “People” keywords, and face tagging too. I’m weirdly obsessive about face tagging. What happens to all my tagged faces when I migrate?

The People keywords themselves come in as regular keywords. The face region data is maintained in the new Lightroom CC database after migrating from Classic. But Lightroom CC doesn’t know anything about that stuff, so you can’t see, access, create, delete, or modify any of the face region data in Lightroom CC.

Okay, so if I migrate now, I’m saying goodbye to face recognition and face tagging for the time being, because while I could continue to do it in Lightroom Classic, it would be a dead-end there.

Yup, pretty much.

This is one big reason I’m not quite ready to do this yet.

The other thing I’m concerned about is how I’ll continue to use Lightroom Classic alongside Lightroom CC. Currently, I’m enjoying Lightroom CC, but that’s because whenever I hit a wall with its limited functionality, I can pop open Lightroom Classic and do all the panorama merging, tone-curve editing, Facebook publishing, color range masking, book making, hardware-assisted editing, and reverse-geo-tagging I desire. Lightroom Classic is the the feature-rich safety net that lets me luxuriate in the CC world of cloudy elegance and simplicity.

This photo uses Color Range Masking, something you can do in Lightroom Classic, but not in Lightroom CC.

But once I migrate from Classic to CC, Adobe’s recommendation is that I turn off sync in Lightroom Classic. I understand why this is (I think), but I’m planning on ignoring that advice. I imagine that turning on sync for the catalog I migrated from could create some nasty conflicts, so instead, I am planning on creating a brand-new, empty Lightroom Classic catalog and turning on sync for that.

Don’t do that. If you insist on keeping sync turned on in Lightroom Classic after migrating to Lightroom CC, just continue to use your existing Classic catalog. So long as you’re using the latest version of Lightroom Classic, it knows not to sync down all of the photos that it already has.

Okay, that’s reassuring. I had been prepared for a complete re-download of my entire 4TB history of digital photography, but I’m happy not to have to do that.

What matters to me is that I maintain my own local copy of all my originals. I know I can set Lightroom CC to do that, but by using Lightroom Classic for this purpose, I’m killing two birds with one stone — I get my local archive, and the full-featured utility of Classic, in one place. Everywhere else, on my laptop and iOS devices, I’ll use CC. When I travel, I’ll keep Classic running on my iMac in my studio, so it’s downloading and making redundant backups (thanks to Backblaze) of whatever I’m able to upload via CC from the road.

This brilliant plan of mine has zero flaws and is brilliant, yet directly contradicts Adobe’s official advice. What am I missing?

If you want to have all your originals in the cloud, then you should use Lightroom CC. If Lightroom CC is not yet capable enough for you, then you should forgo the golden paradise of cloud storage and continue to use Lightroom Classic as you do now, until such a time as Lightroom CC has evolved enough to meet your needs. Knowing what, specifically, you miss from Classic will of course help us prioritize our ongoing improvements to Lightroom CC.

I’m always happy to provide that kind of feedback, as you know. Right now there’s so much that’s missing that I’m definitely not ready to migrate. But I really like Lightroom CC, and I love the idea of having all my photos in “the cloud,” so I imagine someday there will be an inflection point where the pros of migrating will outweigh the cons, and I’ll take the plunge before CC is 100% able to do every Classic thing I rely on. So this idea of using Classic and CC together is hard for me to shake. Why does Adobe recommend against it?

Could you, as a technically sophisticated person who is aware of the potential pitfalls (and who has my phone number for when you get in trouble) cobble together a workflow that uses both applications, such that all your originals are up in the cloud, but you can continue working primarily in Classic? Certainly...

Where it Got Weird

Benjamin did then go on to answer my question in great detail, giving candid and concrete reasons why Adobe recommends against syncing Classic and CC, despite the fact that they are designed to do just that. However, Adobe PR asked me to replace all that helpful information (three paragraphs worth) with this:

...But it's not a workflow we recommend or plan to invest in going forward.

Adobe seems really touchy about this stuff. I think what Benjamin wrote would have helped clear the air with some refreshing honesty, and I’m sad that you didn’t get to read it.

I will share one solid flaw in my plan that Benjamin thought of, but didn’t write about: Remember that Lightroom CC’s “truth is in the cloud,” where Lightroom Classic thinks of your local storage as the canonical location of a photo. This distinction becomes abundantly meaningful when you delete a photo. If you delete it from Lightroom CC, Lightroom Classic doesn’t delete its local original. It keeps it, and just thinks of it as un-synced.

So you could have this scenario — and, in fact, I’ve unwittingly done exactly this:

1. Import a photo into Lightroom CC. In Spain.
2. It syncs up to Lightroom’s cloud photo storage.
3. Lightroom Classic, dutifully running on your computer back home, downloads the photo to its local storage.
4. Still in Spain, you realize the photo is hot garbage, and delete it.
5. But it’s still in your Lightroom Classic library. Forever.
6. Sad trombone.

My conclusion? Maybe I’ll be waiting even longer than I hoped to migrate to Lightroom CC.

Back to the Q&A

As I mentioned, my Lightroom Classic catalog has a mix of photos imported into Classic, and synced-in from CC.

Any photos that are imported into Classic and synced up to CC from there have originals on my local drive, and Smart Previews on CC.

Any photos originating from Lightroom CC have the originals on CC. So my CC stuff is a mix of originals and Smart Previews.

When I do migrate, will all the Smart Previews be replaced with originals?

Well, to be totally technically correct (my favorite kind of correct!) “replaced” is probably not accurate, I think it keeps the Smart Preview around as well. But the simple answer to your question is “yes.” Any photo which is imported into Lightroom CC (including via migration) will have its original uploaded to the cloud, even if that photo was already represented in the cloud by a Smart Preview.

I have a lot of photos, and they are on a big external drive. I know Lightroom CC has to manage its own storage, i.e. it can’t reference my local copies the way Classic does. I understand why this is, and I think it was the right decision for Lightroom CC. However, I don’t have enough room on my system drive to store a redundant copy of all my originals. So what should I do when it’s time to migrate?

You need free space equal to the amount of space taken up by your images, but that free space doesn’t have to be on your system drive, it can be anywhere. Before starting the migration, go to the Lightroom CC preferences and change the location where originals are stored to some drive (internal or external) that has enough free space to hold all your images.

If you don’t have enough free space anywhere, and don’t want to buy another drive, then your alternative is to export sections of your master catalog as smaller catalogs, and migrate those smaller catalogs one at a time, not beginning the next until the previous has finished syncing originals to the cloud, so that the local cache can be cleared.

Okay, so I’ll make sure I have enough space on Big External Drive Two for a complete copy of all my locally-stored originals, set Lightroom CC to use that location for originals, and then initiate the migration.

Then Lightroom CC will copy everything over to this managed storage, and start sending it up to Creative Cloud to the best of its abilities given my internet upload bandwidth.

Can I immediately tell Lightroom CC that I do not want it to store originals? Will it then remove them from Big External Drive Two as they are added to the cloud?

Or should I wait until the post-migration mega-sync is complete before I do this?

You don’t ever need to tell it that you _do_ want to store originals locally. In other words, in the Lightroom CC preferences, set a custom location for the storage of originals, but do not check the “Store a copy of ALL originals locally” checkbox. Thus that local copy of all your originals that Lightroom CC makes at the time of migration will just be a cache that it will purge on its own when it can.

Do not switch the storage location for originals back to your internal drive until after all the upload is complete, because when you switch the location, Lightroom will try to move all the originals from the old location to the new location and, in your case, will find that it does not have room to do so.

Here's Lightroom CC set up as Benjamin describes. Originals are stored as needed on my external drive unironically called "Everything 02," but won't be kept there for longer than Lightroom CC needs them for caching purposes.

Okay, I feel like I have a good sense of what I need to do when I’m ready to pull the trigger. Is there anything else I should be asking you?

Not that I can think of. Have you read Recommended Steps: Prepare for Migration, and do you have any questions about that?

Not yet, but thanks for the link!

Thanks so much for agreeing to do this Q&A! I've found it very helpful, and I hope the rest of the Lightroom 1% will as well.

You’re welcome.

You can follow Benjamin on Instagram, where he (almost) exclusively posts photos from his ferry commute to Adobe’s San Francisco office.

And that’s the end of the Q&A.

In Summary

• If I migrate now, I’m saying goodbye to face tagging as I know it in Lightroom Classic.
• Lightroom CC stores proxies and previews on my local drive, but can be configured to store originals in any location I choose. This has nothing to do with whether or not I’ve configured Lightroom CC to keep local copies permanently.
• So if I want to migrate all at once, I do need enough free space for a duplicate set of photos, but it doesn’t have to be on my system drive.
• My plan to keep using Classic with sync turned on after migrating to CC is not as brilliant and flawless as I’d hoped, and not at all recommended or supported by Adobe. So good luck to me with that.
• If I want to postpone migration for a good long time, but still use Lightroom CC as I have been, I should be careful to only reject photos from CC, and delete them using Classic, or I’ll have local copies in Classic of photos I don’t want. Which I already do. From Spain.

Reconsidering The Plan

I started this post thinking that I’d committed to this plan of migrating to Lightroom CC before it could do 100% of the things I rely on Classic for, knowing that Classic would always be there for me as a feature-rich fallback. But I’m pretty well chastened by Benjamin’s admonitions to the contrary — the stuff I got to read and you didn’t.

Adobe’s getting a lot of flack for this confusing situation of offering two apps that do the same job, and sync with one another, and then advising you against doing that — and deservedly so. Now that it’s my words, not Ben’s, I’ll try to explain what I think Adobe is having trouble expressing:

This photo uses the tone curve in Lightroom Classic, not found in Lightroom CC desktop.

If you use Classic and turn sync on, here’s how you should think about it:

Your one Lightroom Classic catalog (only one can sync, remember) is the truth, and your originals are local. If you sync a collection, Lightroom Classic only uploads “Smart Previews” of your photos, which are compressed DNG files at a reduced resolution.

Even though it won’t upload originals, syncing a collection from Lightroom Classic has some utility. You can publish the collection to the web, share a short URL, and get direct feedback from clients. You can view and even edit your synced photos in Lightroom CC on your mobile device, or on another computer. Sure, you’re working with reduced-resolution proxies, but your edits sync back to Lightroom Classic, where they are applied to your originals. So you can use CC for some light editing, and for flag/reject/rate triage. Just keep it to rejecting, not deleting, because deleting a photo from CC won’t delete it in Classic. Because Classic is the boss, not the cloud.

That’s a real workflow. I’ve done all these things since the moment Lightroom for iOS was released. It works, and it’s useful.

And this is a workflow that uses both Lightroom Classic and Lightroom CC, and while Adobe might not recommend it, they do essentially support it.

But there are pain points with this age-old the-truth-is-on-my-local-drive workflow. Travel is a big one, as I detailed here. The cloud is sitting right there, and I want to use it. Like, really use it.

If you migrate to Lightroom CC, here’s how you should think about Classic:

It’s going to hurt you.

Once you’ve converted to primarily using Lightroom CC, your canonical photo library is on Adobe’s cloud servers. This is great, but it’s fundamentally at odds with how Lightroom Classic works.

Classic can’t gently dip into your Creative Cloud photo library, sync in a few shots, and let you work on them. It only knows how to download everything it sees. And worse still, it then considers those local copies to be “the truth.” There’s no way to use just a little Classic via sync. It’s all or nothing. Classic thinks it’s the boss, so it makes a terrible client.

My Recommendations

If you’re a light Lightroom (Classic) user, or have wanted to try Lightroom but always found it too complex, jump on Lightroom CC. It’s really great. Having all your photos in the cloud is wonderful, and this is the future that Adobe is investing in.

If you, like me, are a die-hard Lightroom Classic user who has dabbled in Lightroom CC, and even come to reply on it a bit, don’t migrate yet. Lightroom CC isn’t ready for you. There will be headaches. And remember, this isn’t a Final Cut 7/Final Cut X situation — Adobe is continuing to develop Lightroom Classic. It already has new a new editing features that CC doesn’t: Color Range Masking. That’s a great new capability that joins the very long list of things Classic can do that CC can’t.

This photo uses Split Toning. You guessed it, not available in Lightroom CC desktop.

Lightroom Classic may not be the new hotness, but it’s still the best tool for photo management I know of, combining power-user organizational features and the best photo processing engine available. This is an awkward period of transition as Adobe tries to bring a much-needed fresh approach to photo editing without upsetting long-standing workflows. Adobe is a big, complex company, and they sometimes can’t help but shoot themselves in the foot when trying to communicate about these kinds of changes. Have I helped them with this post? I really don’t care — but if you’ve read this far, I sincerely hope I’ve helped you, even a tiny bit.

What’s Going on with Lightroom?

Last week at Adobe Max, some big changes were announced for the Lightroom family of products. The Lightroom that we know and love has been rebranded to Lightroom Classic, and the unmodified “Lightroom CC” name has been applied to an all-new app that joins the mobile and web versions of Lightroom in a cloud-based online storage model. Despite previous indications to the contrary, these releases also mark the end of Lightroom being sold outside of the Creative Cloud subscription model.

Real Quick on the Names

The name change is confusing. Lightroom Product Manager (and my long-time friend) Benjamin Warde gives a refreshingly-un-corporate rundown of the changes here:

It’s actually worse than Benjamin is letting on though. Within the app, “the old Lightroom” refers to itself as Adobe Lightroom Classic CC. But the official Adobe name is Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic CC. No one ever uses this version of the name, but that’s the actual name (found only in the splash screen).

The “new Lightroom,” previewed last year as “Project Nimbus,” will generally be colloquially known as Lightroom CC, but in fact also has “Photoshop” uselessly grafted into its seldom-used official title, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom CC. Adobe’s own website is gleefully inconsistent with this naming.

For the sake of sanity, the Prolost style guide for Lightroom will be Lightroom CC for the new cloudy thing (including the iOS and Android apps), and Lightroom Classic for the venerable old desktop girl.

Last thing about the names: This stuff is hard, and Adobe worked hard on it. They wanted to both signal that Lightroom CC, the connected, cloud-synced, slick-new-hotness, joins Lightroom web and Lightroom mobile to form their new and ongoing vision of Lightroom, and also ensure folks that the Lightroom they know and love is not being discontinued.

But the path they chose is going to cause problems. People downloading “Lightroom” will search the web for help and tutorials, and what they find will be referring to something very different from what is on their screen.

Lightroom Classic

Lightroom Classic got a small but meaningful upgrade, with performance improvements that you’ll actually notice, and a new trick for Local Adjustments called Color Range Masking. You can now further isolate a Local Adjustment with a color picker or luminance range mask. I’ve found this new color control to be very useful. My favorite thing to do with it is enhance color contrast by keying in warmer warms in a shot to which I’ve given an overall cool tone, or vise versa.

A photo from Bevagna, Italy, with some nice warm and cool tones that I wanted to emphasize.

The Color Range Mask I used to isolate and cool off the blue shadows in the image, using a local Color Temperature adjustment.

Lightroom Classic has the classic double-edged sword situation of mature, well-loved software. It’s powerful, with well-trodden workflows aplenty, but it’s also starting to feel bloated and out-of-date. This is ironic given that Lightroom was conceived from within Adobe as a disruptive rethink to photo workflows.

How do you modernize something that’s so feature-rich? How do you simplify a tool with hundreds of tiny-but-essential workflows that scores of people rely on? Back when Photoshop was the incumbent, the answer was Lightroom. Now that Lightroom is the old dog, the answer is... well, Lightroom once again.

Lightroom CC

The new Lightroom is simple, clean, minimal, and modern. It feels like Lightroom for iPad, ported to the Desktop. This sense of focus comes at a cost of course: Lightroom CC has a tiny fraction of the functionality of Lightroom Classic. There’s none of Lightroom Classic’s geo-tagging or book-making, or even the tone curve or split-toning controls you’ll find in Lightroom CC for iOS and Android. There’s no way to nudge up the exposure on three shots at once, or to automatically updated a published folder of custom-configured JPEGs. No soft-proofing, no print layouts, no face detection, no HDR or panorama merging, no support for third-party hardware controllers. Not yet, anyway.

Grid View

No more collections — they're now Albums, the same ones you may have already set up in Lightroom for iOS/Android.

Another Grid

I've got no blank space baby.

Edit

It's not Develop, it's Edit, and most, but not all, of Lightroom Classic's controls are here. Including Presets!

AI Search

This search is showing flagged images that Lightroom thinks might contain a church. This isn't based on keywords, it's done with image-recognition AI.

What there is, instead, is a glorious simplification of the most historically vexing aspect of photo management: Where are my files? Most people I know who tried and failed to get started with Lightroom got hung up on on this seemingly simple point.

Lightroom CC syncs all of your camera originals to the cloud. Importing is therefore very simple, with almost no options, because this is the fundament of Lightroom CC: Adobe stores your originals on their servers, you access them from any device you like.

Adobe is, of course, playing catch-up here. Google and Apple already have exactly this setup. But I never wanted what they were selling, because I like Lightroom’s processing too much. It very much feels to me that this is how digital photography should be, and the cloud-centric workflow of Lightroom CC is, to me, its best and most important feature.

CC Subscribers can download and start using Lightroom CC now. If you've already been using Lightroom for web or iOS/Android, it will be immediatly familiar and useful.

Using Lightroom CC and Lightroom Classic Together

This is totally possible, and what I’m doing right now. Photos that I add to Lightroom CC get downloaded automatically to Lightroom Classic. Anything I sync up from Lightroom Classic appears in Lightroom CC (desktop and mobile). [1]

Lightroom CC for iOS was the gateway drug to my comfort with this workflow. Once I started using Lightroom as my primary camera app on my iPhone, I had to come to terms with adding originals to my library via sync. I configured Lightroom to put incoming synced files where I want them, with a naming and folder convention that works for me.

When originals get uploaded to Adobe's Creative Cloud from Lightroom CC, this pref tells Lightroom Classic where to download them to. So when I shoot a DNG with my iPhone, it automatically downloads to my local storage at work, as long as Lightroom Classic is running.

Photos synced in from Lightroom CC follow this same convention, and here’s how this works in practice: I’m on vacation in Barcelona, taking tons of photos both with my iPhone 7 Plus and my Sony RX1R II. Back at my hotel every night, the iPhone shots sync up to Creative Cloud via the hotel WiFi. Those are camera original DNG files being added to my Lightroom CC library. Meanwhile, on my MacBook Pro, I’m importing the Sony shots into Lightroom CC. These originals are now following the same flow; uploading to Adobe’s servers, available to browse and edit on my iPhone and iPad, and automatically downloading to Lightroom Classic, which I’ve left running on my primary computer back home.[2]

Previously, when traveling, I would rely on a complicated workflow that involved a local one-off Lightroom library, a lot of redundant backups to multiple portable drives, and a labor-intensive process of merging this mini-catalog into my primary Lightroom library on my return. Not only is all that gone now, but my camera originals I uploaded in Spain were backed up in five separate places in very short order: my local drive, Adobe’s servers, my home computer, and the Backblaze backups of both my MacBook Pro and my home iMac.[3]

Migrating

There is a workflow for migrating from Lightroom Classic to Lightroom CC. I’m not doing it yet, and here’s why:

As much as I want all of my photos on the cloud, I still rely on Lightroom Classic features quite a bit. Many of these features, such as Published Smart Collections, rely on keywords, and keywords do not sync between Lightroom Classic and Lightroom CC.

Once I migrate, my keywords will move over to the Lightroom CC cloud-cuckoo-land, but they will never sync back to Lightroom Classic, which is the only app that currently does anything cool with them.

Failed business idea: Selling pitchforks and torches via subscription model only.

— Stu Maschwitz (@5tu) October 23, 2017

Paying for Software

I make a living selling software, so it may not surprise you to learn that I am an advocate for paying for software. I think Adobe’s subscription model makes perfect sense for a cloud-based offering, and I think their prices are fair. For those who prefer Lightroom Classic and don’t care about the cloud, I still think a subscription model is smart. It allows Adobe to update Lightroom as they see fit, without having to stockpile features for marketing-friendly upgrade cycles.

Despite these opinions, I also tried my best to support the standalone-Lightroom user community by releasing a free set of presets that gave Lightroom 6 users access to a Dehaze adjustment added to the subscription-version only. This put me directly in touch with thousands of Lightroom users who prefer to pay once for software and upgrade when they feel like it. These folks aren’t crazy, and they aren’t stingy either — many of them chose to pay a few dollars for this free download, given the opportunity.

I’m not here to argue with anyone about how, why, or how often to pay for software. But I will say this: If you think Adobe has abandoned perpetual licensing because “they don’t listen to their customers,” you’re mistaken. When Tom Hogarty says “Customers are overwhelmingly choosing the Creative Cloud Photography plan,” that’s not made up. For every one person complaining, there are hundreds willing to pay as much for ongoing, updated access to Lightroom as they do for Netflix or Spotify. The vehement anti-subscription crowd make up a very visible, very vocal minority, but they are indeed a tiny minority.

Whether you’re a photographer, a plumber, or a software-maker, when you set your price, you choose your customers. This makes some customers unhappy, because they feel the choice being taken from them. But there’s nothing devious going on here. If you make something and sell it, I hope your customers are happy to give you their money, as I am happy to give Adobe mine. 4

If you’re still lighting your torches and sharpening your pitchforks, here are a few points to consider:

• You can still buy Lightroom 6 standalone, and use it until your computer dies. You won’t get new camera support after 2017, but you’ll be able to use Adobe’s free DNG converter to convert future camera raw files to an importable format.
• Being a CC subscriber is not a lifetime commitment to giving Adobe money. If you’re an occasional hobbyist, you can take a break from paying, and then resume your subscription when you need it. When Lightroom is unlicensed, it can still do a lot, including view, search, export. Classic will even allow even some basic editing.
• Photography costs money. If you’re 30 now and plan on shooting to the age of 90, 60 years of $10/month is $7,200. I spent about a third of that the last time I walked into a camera store, on a lens, a light, and a battery. A roll of film used to cost nearly $10. Get off my lawn. That I irrigate with water I subscribe to.

A Cloudy Future

I do intend to migrate my primary Lightroom Classic catalog 5 to Lightroom CC, just not yet. But eventually I’ll be all-in on this cloud thing. I’ll still use Lightroom Classic for everything it can uniquely do, but the cloud model is just too useful for me to avoid for long. I’ll keep you posted on this eventual transition.

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1. Just remember that while Lightroom Classic downloads full-res originals, it only uploads “Smart Previews,” which are reduced-resolution DNG proxies. Lightroom Classic will never be a fully-synced CC citizen.  ↩

2. Lightroom CC can be configured to do this as well. Like Apple Photos, each Lightroom CC client can optionally be set up to store full-quality originals locally. You might opt for this on your desktop computer, but not your laptop, for example.  ↩

3. When hotel internet is too slow to reliably get a day’s worth of photos uploaded overnight, I would also back up locally, using Red Giant Offload to copy my camera card to a portable SSD. I like the Samsung T3/T5 line for this — they’re small, crazy fast, and reliable.  ↩

4. When I can. As a frequent Adobe collaborator, I pay for some Adobe services and not others.  ↩

5. Ah good old Master Catalog LR6 140923-2-2-2-2.lrcat.  ↩

Lightroom Mobile 2.7, Now With HDR

If you look back through my recent Instagram posts, you may notice something unusual (for me): the majority of photos I’ve posted lately are not from my big, full-frame cameras (currently: 5D Mark III, Sony a7S II, and Sony RX1R II), but rather from my iPhone 7 Plus.

Posting iPhone photos to Instagram is hardly unusual, but what’s new is that I’m once again inspired by the creative possibilities of my little telephone camera. Part of this inspiration comes from the ability to shoot raw with Lightroom Mobile. Raw capture, combined with Lightroom’s editing controls (including local adjustments), does deliver on the initial promise of “Lightroom on your camera” that I wrote about here.

But as sharp and portable as the iPhone camera is, and as powerful as Lightroom’s editing controls are, telephone photos still struggle with dynamic range. Clipped highlights and/or noisy shadows are still the giveaways. You know, physics and all. But today Adobe has updated Lightroom Mobile (2.6 for iOS, 2.3 for Android) with a new feature: High Dynamic Range (HDR) capture.

The Camera module of Lightroom Mobile now has three modes: Automatic, Professional (which offers manual exposure controls), and High Dynamic Range. In HDR mode, Lightroom captures three shots, bright, normal, and dark, and exposure-merges them into one.

Unlike auto-bracketing with your DSLR, Lightroom’s bright and dark exposures are intelligently calculated based on the scene brightness. I’ll let Lightroom product manager Tom Hogarty explain:

Lightroom mobile automatically analyzes the scene to determine the appropriate spread of exposure values over three shots (most other apps only average two exposures). Then, Lightroom automatically aligns, de-ghosts, and tone maps the image, creating a 32-bit floating point DNG file which can then be edited as desired.

Lightroom Mobile product manager Josh Haftel fills in the details:

You get a 16-bit floating point DNG, with all of the benefits of both an HDR and a raw photo, which is processed by the same algorithms with the same quality as the HDR technology built into Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom.

An iPhone snapshot in HDR, helped greatly by Lightroom's desktop-only Guided Upright perspective correction feature.

Some associate “HDR” photography with aggressively-tone-mapped, candy-colored photomanipulations, but Lightroom doesn’t emphasize this kind of processing. You certainly can get at least partway there (just crank Highlights down, Shadows, Clarity, and Vibrance up), but Lightroom makes it just as easy to treat the extended dynamic range of HDR captures as a good, healthy digital negative with clean shadows and lots of highlight detail. You may just find that you have to dial back the Highlights and Shadows slider from the defaults, which are dynamically set at capture.

Shooting directly into a shaded garage and, you know, the Earth's sun.

The majority of the tone mapping of an HDR shot comes from the Highlights and Shadows sliders, which default to aggressive settings that you may wish to tone down.

The Cost

Lightroom’s HDR DNGs are compressed, but they’re still big. A typical DNG from my iPhone 7 is 14 MB, and the HDR files are around 40–43 MB. iPhone JPEGs are about 2 MB.

Lightroom processes these HDR merges right on your phone, and then uploads them to Creative Cloud. Your battery life and bandwidth will be put to the test. Near the end of a full day of shooting casually with Lightroom Mobile, a mix of HDR and DNG shots, my iPhone 7 Plus battery did give out, which wouldn’t happen if you restricted yourself to shooting JPEG with Apple’s built-in Camera app.

You can, of course, tell Lightroom Mobile not to sync unless it’s on WiFi, which helps — but I choose to deal with the power consumption problem by bringing a portable battery pack along. I like this one, which is, ironically, about the size and weight of a decent point-and-shoot camera.

Speaking of cost, while Lightroom Mobile is a free app, its real power comes with a Creative Cloud subscription. The Photography Plan, which includes Lightroom and Photoshop, is $9.99 USD per month. Better deals can sometimes be found on Amazon.

HDR in B&W. Guided Upright again, along with one of my Prolost Vintage Winter 2016 B&W presets.

Other Cool Stuff

Today’s Lightroom Mobile updates also bring local adjustments to Android, and re-introduce of my favorite features: Speed Review, where you swipe up and down to flag photos as “Pick” or “Reject.”

Light Room For Improvement

What’s missing? On the creative side, I find myself wishing Lightroom Mobile had the powerful perspective correction found in the desktop version’s “Upright” controls. The tack-sharp, semi-wide, deep-focus lens of the iPhone loves architecture, and architecture loves Upright — all but one of the photos in this post use it.

There’s still no way to sync Lightroom presets to Lightroom Mobile, forcing us to use a hacky workaround.

You can share a collection of photos directly from Lightroom Mobile, but the detailed control over how that shared collection is presented is still only found on Lightroom Web.

The iPad version of Lightroom has yet to catch up to the Edit control design improvements in the iPhone version.

But most importantly, Lightroom Mobile for iOS is still not capable of background processing. You’ll actually get a warning if you switch away from the app while an HDR merge is being processed. This is a Lightroom limitation, not an iOS restriction. Lightroom won’t process or sync when in the background, or when your phone is asleep. To help deal with this, there’s now an option to prevent your phone from sleeping when it’c connected to power, so you can ensure that all your photos upload properly.

This background processing limitation means that Lightroom Mobile can still trash your edits if you’re not careful.

So be careful.

With Great Power

Speaking of being careful, HDR can get ugly. As with everything in the photographer’s arsenal, taste and technique are what’s going to bring you great results, not tech.

Read more about Lightroom Mobile 2.6/2.3 on Tom Hogary’s blog, or on Julianne Kost’s, or Josh Haftel's. Download it on the App Store or on Google Play.

More Lightroom, More Dehazing, More Free Presets

Today at Adobe MAX, the entire Lightroom lineup was updated, from Lightroom Web to Lightroom Mobile for iOS and Android. Lightroom itself is now at 6.2 (perpetual) and 2015.2 (Creative Cloud), and guess what? It comes with more Dehazing-related features that are only available to Creative Cloud subscribers.

You may recall that, with Lightroom 6.1/2015.1, Adobe introduced a new control for removing haze from photos — but only for subscribers. I wrote about that here, and offered some free presets to enable the functionality even for non-CC users.

Today's update adds Dehaze to the list of local adjustments, meaning CC users can brush it in, or use it on a Graduated or Radial Filter.

Now before you get out your jumbo Sakura marker and make a protest sign that says “How dare Adobe provide new functionality on a continual basis exclusively to people who pay on a continual basis?”, take a deep breath and download Prolost Dehaze v1.2, which gives Lightroom 6 owners (limited) access to these new features, even without a Creative Cloud subscription.

Prolost Dehaze 1.2 includes:

• Dehaze — the same global Dehaze from 1.0, but with finer increments.
• Gradient Dehaze
• Radial Dehaze

The workflow is a little funky, so you’ll want to read the User’s Guide. In a nutshell, you can move and edit the Graduated or Radial Filter created by the preset, and even edit it with the Brush tool, but you won't reliably be able to adjust the intensity of the Dehazing effect after applying. Please really do RTFM on this one, because there are big limitations and a right and wrong way to work with these presets.

Prolost Dehaze v1.2 is free, just like last time, and I’ve made the download process a lot easier since then.

Prolost Dehaze is a part of the Prolost Graduated Presets, which I've updated as well to include the new Dehaze presets.

What else is new with Lightroom?

The headlining feature in Lightroom 6.2/2015.2 is a simplified import experience. Lightroom Mobile for iOS has been upped to 2.0, with the addition of an improved Collections View, a built-in camera, and oh, boy, the Dehaze control. Lightroom Mobile is now free to use locally (device photos only) without a Creative Cloud subscription. And Lightroom Web now allows you to edit your photos for some reason. Read all about it at the official Lightroom blog.

Update 2015-10-09

This release of Lightroom has been controversial for both the features removed in the name of streamlining the import process, and for some crashing/performance issues on Mac, possibly having to do with El Capitan. Today, Adobe released 6.2.1 to address the crashing and performance issues. Find it under Help → Updates.

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