Adobe has really gotten serious about mobile photography and iOS. To further emphasize that focus, the company Tuesday released a barrel of updates to Photoshop, Lightroom and Lightroom for iOS. Although not getting updates, the new releases integrate with other Adobe products for iOS including Adobe Voice, Adobe Slate and Photoshop Mix.
It’s very clear that Adobe is revolutionizing photographer workflow, so that a photo can be taken on a DSLR or an iPhone, then edited on a laptop or desktop, finished on an iPhone or iPad, then uploaded or used as part of a larger project. Each piece of the Adobe universe can interact with every other piece, allowing high end editing in the field with iOS devices. Assets are in the cloud, and when a change is made, it’s replicated everywhere.
Adobe bundles all this with a $9.99 month Creative Cloud for Photographers plan. That’s actually quite reasonable for Photoshop, Lightroom, and all the iOS apps, plus cloud storage.
Lightroom for iOS
Of interest to Life in LoFi readers is the iOS portion of this release. Currently, Lightroom for iOS lets you edit and organize files uploaded from your DSLR or photos from your camera roll already on your device. All the standard Lightroom tools exist in the iOS versions, and your edits than travel to the cloud where you can retrieve the photo on another device. There are also options to share finished photos on social networks.
The updated Lightroom for iOS supports star ratings, custom sort orders, and allows you to sync GPS data to your desktop. It also supports copying and pasting adjustments for faster editing, and a segmented Grid view.
Lightroom for Mac
The biggest update appears to be in the Lightroom OS X family. Lightroom now offers HDR Merge, something never seen before in Lightroom. The same for Panorama Merge. Lightroom also sees some speed improvements, and Adobe claims performances increases of up to 10x. You can’t create the panoramas or HDR photos on the iOS version of Lightroom, but you can edit once you download the images.
Lightroom also adds facial recognition, something we’ve seen for awhile in the now discontinued iPhoto, but it has been retained on the new OS X Photos app.
Summing up
Formerly Photoshop and Lightroom were made for pros and semi-pros, but with a $9.95 per month subscription the company is wanting everyone serious about photography to jump in. Adding complete editing and syncing between iOS devices and Adobe’s Mac apps makes professional editing portable. Photoshop Mix for iOS doesn’t have any updates this time around, but it gives you most of the power of Photoshop on your iPhone or iPad. With other apps like Adobe Slate for iPad and Adobe Voice for iPad photographers can use their image assets to create compelling slide shows and animated videos.
The new Lightroom for iOS wasn’t available for early testing, but I’ll give it a good workout shortly.
For those of us shooting on iOS, but also editing on desktop or Mac laptops, these new features are very desirable. If you were thinking about getting into the Creative Cloud world, this now much enhanced ecosystem might push you over the edge.
– Mel Martin
