Lightroom 9.0 November Update

On monday Adobe’s Max conference startet and of course Adobe used this event to publish some new software and sodftware updates for video and image processing.

As usual this autumn Adobe published updates for almost all programs in the image and video sector. For us photographers the main interest surely is on the new Lightroom and the Photoshop CC updates. Lightroom was brought to version 9 with this upgrade. A change in  the major release will keep some expectations. But just to mention it, the new Lightroom version doesn’t offer that much new as you might would expect from a change in the major version.

At first start of the new version you get a note about the Lightroom catalog must be converted first for the new version. This conversion only takes a couple minutes.

After this conversion process we can start the new version.

I did a small video on the new Lightroom function:

First as a improved function its now possible to export a selected image with different export presets in one call.

With this improvement its now possible to do multiple exports one or more images in one job, for example a 16-Bit Tiff and a smaller JPEG. To guarantee this to work out fast pay attention to the export preset and define a valid export destination folder, otherwise you’ll be asked for exvery image and for every export preset.

There is a new feature in the panorama merge function, a sort of AI powered content-aware filling for the blank pixels in a panorama shot.

This new function “fill Edges” works out very well in most cases and is better than the Boundary warp function:

There are also changes arround the color labels for collections and folders. Now you can filter the collection list to a certain color label.

But what i miss is a seperate color label set, which can be used for folders/collections and the other one for single images. And it would be nice if Adobe would not only show the text but also the color label.

In the development modul we find two smaller changes. First now its possible to export user presets as a group. But this works only for the user presets.

And finally in the development history you can delete all changes above a certain entry and of course reset the processing of the image to this point.

With this we have mentioned all new features in Lightroom 9. This is not enough for a change in the major version in my opinion. The improvements in the panorama merge function Adobe implements AI based functions and i think this should be reinforced.

In Photoshop CC 2020 the new object selection tool is more developed, because this tool to mark and mask the main subject in an image works pretty good. Sometimes if there are may potential subjects you have to help the program by selecting the main subject.

What do you think about the new features/improvements in Lightroom 9? Maybe you place a comment what you think about the changes because in my opinion its not enough for a new major release.

ciao tuxoche