Lightroom Just Received a Huge Workflow Update: Are You Switching Back?

Adobe has recently updated Lightroom and some of the new features are pretty useful.

As architectural photographers, I’m sure most of us are pretty familiar with having huge numbers of layers in Photoshop. Light painting and compositing can cost a lot of storage and many of us have become accustomed to using PSB files, especially with the advent of higher-megapixel cameras where only a few layers will put you over the size limit. The frustrating thing about Lightroom was that previously, once you saved your file in Photoshop as a PSB, you could no longer open it in Lightroom.

One of the things I really liked about Lightroom and Photoshop was that I could start editing an image in Lightroom, switch to Photoshop and once satisfied, return back to Lightroom. PSB files used to throw a wrench in the system and it would just destroy the whole workflow. Fortunately, Adobe has finally offered a meaningful update and now Lightroom can read PSB files too.

Other New Improvements

Another improvement this latest update offers is better control over your raw file defaults. Essentially, when you import a file you can have certain settings automatically applied to the raw files. The great thing about this feature is that you either have your defaults apply to specific cameras or on all raw files you import. This extra control I think will be useful, especially for those of us that shoot with multiple cameras.

Auto Sync

Have you ever been editing a batch of files and forgot that you had auto sync on? Well, Adobe is now making this feature more visible. In the Develop module, you’ll be able to see the “Auto Sync” clearly sat next to the “Reset” button at the bottom. It appears when you hold the ctrl button when you’ve selected multiple images.

Second Monitor Display

This feature is probably going to useful one for those that edit with a multi display set-up. You can now select which monitor will operate as your second display.

Minor Updates

Adobe has also implemented a few performance updates. Apparently the software will be faster and operate more effectively with your computers GPU. I have been using the latest version and I’m not experiencing any differences in performance.

Lightroom still remains more of a quick and dirty option when it comes to editing for me. There just isn’t enough going on with this software to make me want to continue using it. The software is still not properly optimized and is simply terrible at managing multiple high resolution files.
Just today, I attempted to edit a few images form the GFX 100 and Lightroom had what I can only describe as a panic attack. The same files imported into Capture One caused absolutely no problems whatsoever.

Personally, I won’t be switching back to Lightroom for any of my work. Although, I do still use it for the odd, quick edit.

What do you think, is this latest update enough for you to take Lightroom seriously? More details about the latest update can be found here.