Updates!
Lightroom CC and 6 have gotten a .1 update today, along with a matching Camera Raw 9.1.
Dehaze
The big news is already out of the bag from Terry White last week, and it’s the Dehaze slider, which removes haze in landscapes shots. Like the good old Clarity tool, you can use it in reverse to add fog to a shot. Great for adding mood. Here’s a look at the effect.
Normal
Dehaze -40
Dehaze +40
Local Sliders
In addition, there’s also two new local sliders, Whites and Blacks. These allow you to make adjustments using Brush, Graduated Filter and Radial Filter on the extreme ends of the tonal range at on individual parts of your image.
A huge thing to note is these features are Creative Cloud only. Please note that you CAN use presets that contain the effects though.
The Legal Stuff
To all the disappointed perpetual users, you’re getting the same level of update support in previous versions of Lightroom, which is ongoing lens and camera support. If you weren’t aware of why new features can’t be added to perpetual software, it’s because the US Government has made ‘it illegal for a vendor to add unadvertised features to software that has already been paid for through the Sarbanes-Oxley act’ as noted by Micah Burke in the Lightroom Journal comments. If you want this changed and you’re a US citizen, then start lobbying your politicians. While people will use this a vehicle to imply greed on the part of Adobe, it’s simply Adobe complying with a law they have no say over. It doesn’t apply to the subscription model because you’re renting the software.
Lightroom Mobile
The iOS version of Lightroom mobile now supports videos and adds Vignette, Color, B&W Mix and Tone Curve to the available tools.
Camera and Lens support
As with all single digit releases, there is support for new cameras including the Fuji X-T10, officially out this week. The entire list is on Lightroom Journal.
Bug Fixes
Again there’s a load of bug fixes, but as a Fuji user, the note that ‘In collaboration with Fujifilm, we are still investigating methods to improve fine detail rendering and overall edge definition.‘ is a great one!
It is, in fact, the SOX act that prevents new features from being added to the perpetual license versions between .X releases. Whether it’s worth $10/month to someone to get those updates, fixes and new features, is a personal calculation only they can make. If people can pay that much a month to stream music they don’t own, paying the same amount to use software that they don’t own (and never did) seems like a steal.
The Sarbanes–Oxley Act has nothing to do with what you reference in this blog post. I suggest that you take a look at the wikipedia entry for SOX : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarbanes–Oxley_Act
I have. It’s still the reason Adobe, and Avid for that matter, cite for not providing non subscription programs updates outside of the same accounting quarter.