Adobe unveils Lightroom Classic 8.4 and Lightroom CC 2.4

This morning my smartphone notified me that there is an update for Lightroom CC available.

With such a notification chances are good that there is also a new version for Lightroom Classic published because for Lightroom CC support for new cameras and lenses was mentioned. With the today’s update Lightroom Classic is brought to version 8.4 and Lightroom CC for Android systems is on version 4.4.

If you like to know which new cameras are supported with the new version Adobe states that there are  cameras supported by version 8.4.

I did a little video on the changes:

One of new functions listed for Lightroom Classic is an accelerated image processing with GPU support. This leads us to the question, if this is a new feature of Lightroom Classic. GPU support for Lightroom Classic was implemented in Lightroom  6 back in April 2015.  And in this version according to Adobe only the development module would benefit from the GPU support and this with a mediocre success only. What performance gain can be done with a support of the GPU was shown in PTGui 10.

Now Adobe states that the GPU was used for display purposes only and with the new version it is now possible to activate the GPU support for image processing. Does this mean that GPU support is not activated for the development module as a default setting?

What i can state after a first check is that more memory from the GPU is used and it seemed like local corrections to run smoother.

With version 7.4 a new function was implemented and that was to apply a color label to a folder. Now with the new version it is also possible to aplly color labels to collections. Now you can organize your images, folders and collections  with color labels. In the collections you can filter for collections with a label.

And finally the labels for images, folders and collections now can have different texts. This is consequent because a red label on an image might have a different meaning as the same label on a folder or a collection. .

Besides this HDR or panorama base images can be grouped and version 8.4 adds a batch processing for these set of images.

In Lightroom CC for Android you can mark images and add metadata for example copyright,titles and so oon for all images marked.

Lightroom CC lets you import video files which might be captured with the smartphone.

An option to export the video to  Twitter or Facebook in a lower resolution is still missing.

These are the main new functions in Lightroom Classic 8.4 and Lightroom CC. We have to wait and check out if the “new” GPU support will bring any gain in performance. But besides this all the new functions are only details and like mentioned a couple of times this is the main problem of the subscription model.

ciao tuxoche