Adobe Adds New Color Grading Tools to Lightroom Ecosystem

Today Adobe kicked off their virtual Adobe Max Creativity Conference for 2020. With this conference come a huge list of new announcements for updates and new releases for Creative Cloud. We’ll be covering these on the blog and to start, here is all you need to know about the new color grading tools added to Lightroom.

Highlights from Adobe’s Lightroom announcement:

– Color grading features added to entire Lightroom ecosystem (Windows/Mac, iOS/Android, Web, Lightroom CC, Lightroom Classic, Camera Raw)

– Graphical Watermarking Tools added to Lightroom Family (Computer, Web, Mobile)

– New ‘Discover’ Content and Following Features Added to Lightroom Mobile

– AI ‘Best Photos’ Feature to create an album of your best photos added to Lightroom Mobile

– Major Performance Improvements were made to Lightroom Classic and Camera Raw to speed up the programs

Continue reading below to see more information about all of these highlights and other updates to Adobe Lightroom. With the exciting new social features added to Lightroom Mobile, many are wondering if the app will become more of a community and social network.

Explore, learn, discover, and follow photographers in new Lightroom Mobile update. Photo: Adobe

Advanced Color Grading Tools

Adobe completely replaced split toning with color grading in the latest update. Similar to the Lumetri panel in Premiere Pro, the Color Grading panel in Lightroom offers three color wheels to adjust the midtones, shadows, and highlights. Along with some other really cool features for blending and balance!

Don’t fret if you are worried about presets or old settings you have saved on photos that involved the split toning tool. Adobe shares this reassuring bit in their blog post about the updates ‘But don’t worry: Color Grading is 100% compatible with the old Split Toning. Color Grading is an extension of Split Toning — it can do everything Split Toning did, plus much more. Your existing images with Split Toning settings will look exactly the same as they did before, your old Split Toning presets will also still look the same when you apply them, and you can still get the same results if you had a familiar starting point when doing Split Toning manually.’

Photo: Adobe

Graphical Watermark

Now you can add graphics and logos as watermarks in Lightroom with the latest update. It’s also synced across devices and works in all versions of Lightroom!

Photo: Adobe

Social Features added to Lightroom Mobile

Adobe was testing social features like following photographers and seeing photo feeds on the web version earlier this summer. Today they have added those features to Lightroom Mobile. You can now follow photographers, see their edits, and explore content with the ‘Learn’ and ‘Discover’ sections of the app.

Lightroom Classic and Camera Raw Performance Boost

Adobe made some major performance enhancements to Lightroom Classic and Camera Raw that will help the programs run faster. The latest GPU acceleration is especially beneficial for: Linear Gradient, Radial Gradient, and the Adjustment Brush tool. You can experience up to 2x faster rendering when painting with the brush tool now! GPU acceleration must be enabled for these enhancements, read more about the system requirements here.