What is new in Lightroom 6.4 CC2015.4

Last but one week Adobe released the new Lightroom version and i promised in my last week review to have a closer look on  what is new in Lightroom 6.4 CC2015.4.

Besides the suppoert for a couple new cameras , primary Fuji and Leica bodies, and a whole lot of new lenses especially from Samyang Lightroom CC2015.4 offered a new function..

The Boundary Warp Funktion

I already did a little video on this new function,  so i link to the video again:

This new function might be useful for handheld panoramas captured not using a tripod so the base capture may tilt. This lead into a panorama with a curved horizon which looses a lot in the edges. In theses situations the new function could be helpful.

Improvements in the panorama function

Besides the new boundary warp function which is only included in the Creative Cloud version 2 other improvements are implemented, which are also included in the regular 6.4 version of Lightroom.

a) Increasing stitch performance

Adobe announces the improved stitching function to almost twice as fast as the function in Lightroom 6.3. I could recognize such an improvement in performance in Version 6.2 compare to version 6.1, but there the speed increasement worked against accuracy..

To check this out i took my probably well known panorama which was used to test version 6.2 and stitched it with Lightroom CC2015.4.

Talking about accuracy there is the same problem as in version 6.2, and the preview doesn’t match the final result.

But the preview is available after 25sec. which almost is twice as fast as in version 6.2. The final image is stitched after 3:42 min which is far away from doubleing the speed. And as said in all versions of Lightroom the panorama function suffers the same problem, what to do with the tripod.

So my conclusion for version 6.2 still is valid, and maybe you can take this function for single-rowed panorama, but if you want to do more get yourself a copy of PTGui.

b) Metadata for Photoshop

The regular metadata are included in the final image, so maybe missing metadata for the photoshop filter were added

Lr Mobile

Adding image to iamge to LR Mobile which are not included in Lightroom CC so far, a DNG file is copied to the local profile folder. This could bring you in trouble if you sync a lot of images with LR mobile and your system drive is a smaller SSD.

With the update it is now possible for the user to define the folder to store the DNG files synched from LR Mobile. In addition you can setup a folder hierarchy depending on the capture date of the images.

Faster updates of thumbnails

In Lightroom you sometimes have the situation developing one images and copy and paste the development settings to whole set of images, like for wedding or timelapse images. In library mode in the grid view it takes a while until all thumbnails are updated to the new development settings. According to Adobe this update was speed up.

I did a little video on that and of course it is hard to keepp2 videos in snyc but take a look at it.

I can’t recognize any increase in speed. To make it visible i update 250 images from a timelapse sequence with a crop to HD format and increasement in contrast. But a speed up for updating the thumbnails woth mentioning it is not visible.

Conclusion

Adobe added a new function the boundary warp but the other improvements are so minor, Adobedidn’t to make such a big deal about this. I did a couple of images to try out the better quality on the upright function, but i couldn’t recognize any difference.

The updates according newer cameras and lens profiles the new version should have been 6.3.1 only. If Adobe would implment a couple of the improvments/features described in my article a lot more user would be pleased.

What do think about the version 6.4 which funny enough only carries version CC2015.4 and not 2016? Is it enough to explain a new version or are the changes only minor? I’m looking forward to your comments and questions.

ciao tuxoche