Adobe shipped its (roughly) quarterly release of Lightroom Classic and Lightroom ecosystem today. The big announcement is the addition of Generative AI based on Firefly for the new Generative Remove tool. This allows easy removal of unwanted items like street signs, tourists or even other photographers getting in shot intentionally. It’s revolutionary for a program that normally only does parametric editing. To use, go to the Remove tool and choose Generative AI or the Object Aware options. Generative AI is available as an Early Access feature.
Speaking of Early Access, Lens Blur has seen a number of enhancements including a new AI Model, bringing it out as a general release. This means you can now use Auto Sync, Sync and Previous to batch edit photos, excluded from the previous release.
Unusually for a dot release, 13.3 requires a catalog update. This is because the entire Sync engine has been replaced and you have brand new Preview management, both of which should fix some long standing issues and improve performance. Navigation has been improved in Develop, along with responsiveness.
Sony users can rejoice as a large number of current and some older cameras get Tether support in this release. Note that here is a known bug with the Sony A7IV with the 3.01 firmware. A new addition to filtering is the option to Filter by Exported. Finally there’s a quick way to see which of those photos were the ones you sent of the edits. This works for both Smart Collections and for the Filter Bar (under Attribute). Apple Silicon users (if you haven’t upgraded, you are missing out) now have the Apple Neural Engine enabled for AI Denoise.
There’s the usual slew of newly supported cameras and lenses. It includes the newly announced Fuji X-T50, and for me personally, the additional camera matching profiles for the X100VI. Lenswise there are a few Sigma additions like the 500mm f5,6.
I’ll be updating Essential Development 3 to include the updated Develop changes now that the Lightroom Summit is live.
