Lightroom Ver. 12 and ACR Ver. 15 Updates

Ashok Kandimalla has been in the photographic field for over three decades and has extensive experience in both film and digital photography.

- Ashok Kandimalla

Being an electronics engineer by profession and a photographer, he possesses a unique and deep insight into the technical aspects of digital photography and equipment. He has published more than a 100 articles on photography and some of his writings have also been published in the well-known international magazine Popular Photography. An avid collector of photographic books and vintage cameras, Ashok has a keen interest in the history of photography and a passion for sharing his knowledge on photography through teaching and writing. He is the only Indian photographer to be featured on the Nikon Centenary website. He is presently working as a Management and Engineering consutant. He can be reached at [e-mail].

A dobe recently released a major update for their software packages Lightroom and ACR (Adobe Camera Raw). These bring in substantial improvements to enhance the ease of use by employing advanced AI (Artificial Intelligence) technology.

Lightroom Ver. 12 as the latest version is called, added support for some newly released cameras and also made a few enhancements to the Library module. The most useful one is that when we import a folder, the names of the parent

folders are also displayed. The search engine has also been enhanced and now you can find images taken on a particular date by giving year, month and day of the month.

The most significant improvements are, however, in the Develop module and the same were also introduced in the Ver.15 of ACR. Let us look at these in more detail.

Please note that we are using screen captures of Lightroom for our article.

Those of ACR Version 15, will be similar.

To understand why these improvements are so noteworthy, let us start with the tool strip. This is located just below the histogram on the right panel and has the following tools (Picture 1). From, left to right:

1. Edit

2. Crop Overlay 

3. Healing Tool