I hope you find it helpful! Many thanks to Glyn for having me on as a guest!

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Among all the Premium (subscription required to access) presets, you’ll find the adaptive presets for portrait, sky, subject, and now blur background. Each of those represents a group of presets to achieve certain looks or starting points. The newest take advantage of the new Lens Blur panel (also accessible in Lightroom web), so let’s explore those.

Click each preset to see how it affects your photo, and note there is a Reset Blur preset at the bottom to clear those adjustments. Also, you can click the undo arrow icon at the top of the panel to undo any change. You also need to click the Save button at the top to apply the settings in the preset and move on. Once you click a preset you’ll see an Amount slider allowing you to dial in the intensity of the settings. Once you are happy with the amount, click Save, then click the Edit icon to access all of the editing tool panels and fine tune the results.

In the case of Lens Blur, you can further refine the Amount, Bokeh, and Focus Range to get the photo looking just the way you want. Click Save to finalize your settings, which will be synced across all other Lightroom apps, and you’re ready to move on to the next photo. Give it a spin!

Photoshop World is fast approaching (September 24-26), and I hope you’ll join me and about 30 world-class instructors for multiple days of learning on Lightroom, Photoshop, and photography! The best part of it being virtual is that you get access to the recordings of all classes you can access for one year after the conference! You can get all the details, schedule, and register here: https://photoshopworld.com

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You’ll need to go there in your web browser and log in with the same Adobe ID and password you use on your computer and mobile device for your subscription. Once logged in, and assuming you’ve imported photos into Lightroom or synced from Lightroom Classic, you’ll see your library.

To test drive this new feature, click a photo you’d like to edit to access the editing tools available in the browser-based version of Lightroom.

This new tool is the first one at the top, with the magic wand looking icon, and its name is Quick Actions. What makes this tool so different is that once you choose it, Quick Actions analyzes your photo and then shows buttons it thinks you might want to use on this photo to make it better. The buttons shown vary somewhat with the contents of the photo selected, but expect to see some presets, some single-click adjustments (like Auton tone), some adaptative presets based on subject, some background blur presets, and maybe the straightening tool (if the photo is crooked, or maybe that’s just mine).

I just used the arrow keys on my keyboard to step through all of the photos in this album to see what adjustment options appeared.

For this raw photo below, I clicked Auto light & color, Pop for subject (using a subject-based mask to apply settings to just what it considered the subject), and the Strong background blur button that I dialed back using the slider that appears under the button you click. The eyeball button at the top of the interface is a quick way to see before and after views of your progress.

Now, would I have normally just used one of the Lightroom (including LrC in that) apps to make those edits manually? Yes. That said, for someone new to editing with Lightroom (or in a hurry to quickly edit and share out to social media or both), having the app analyze the photo and only surface adjustments it thinks you might want in a simplified format (buttons), this could be very useful. It is early access, so it will undoubtedly change before it becomes final (or maybe it will just go away never to be seen again?), but worth taking for a spin if you are curious. Would love to know what others think after trying.

Photoshop World is fast approaching (September 24-26), and I hope you’ll join me and about 30 world-class instructors for multiple days of learning on Lightroom, Photoshop, and photography! The best part of it being virtual is that you get access to the recordings of all classes you can access for one year after the conference! You can get all the details, schedule, and register here: https://photoshopworld.com

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Now, if you never experience syncing issues, then high five, you are living your best life. For the rest of us, sometimes, for reasons I do not know or understand, some number of photos just seem to be stuck syncing for (ever) a long time. I had this recently happen to me, so here’s how you can now try to resolve that situation.

First, check the cloud icon to see what’s up. If it is in mid-sync you’ll see a blue syncing icon and if you hover your cursor over it a tooltip will appear showing how many photos are being synced.

If it seems like this has been going on for some time the simplest thing can be to close and restart Lightroom Classic, which can be enough to clear the clog. If that doesn’t work, and you want to take matters into your own hands, click the cloud icon to open the cloud storage window and look for the gear icon.

Click that gear icon to open the Lightroom Sync tab of the preferences and see what’s displayed in the Sync Activity section (this was restored with the recent update).

If you’re not sure what photo is stuck, click that blue link to view that photo in Grid view of the Library showing the photo within its containing folder. Don’t delete the photo from here unless you want to delete the photo entirely from your catalog and hard drive. If you just want to remove it from being synced to clear that (and resync later if you choose) there are two ways to do this now. First, the old fashioned way, which is to leave the problem photo selected and go up to the Catalog panel and click All Synced Photographs.

By leaving the photo selected you’ll see it is still the selected photo when viewing the contents of All Synced Photographs. If you think you will want to add it back to a synced collection later, an easy way to find it again is to drag it to the Quick Collection in the Catalog panel. Now, press Delete to remove it from being synced while leaving the source photo to remain in your catalog. You’ll see this popup telling you what will happen.

Click OK to complete the process. The photo will be removed from all synced collections, which is important to realize what that means. In other words, it will clear it from being stuck syncing, but if you had it in more than one synced collection it will be removed from all of them. So make sure you know which synced collections it was in before you hit the delete button if you plan to add it back them all. In my case, this was an old photo that I no longer need synced, so just removing it from being synced solves my problem. Repeat for any other stuck photos and you should see the Sync Activity area clear out.

The cloud icon will change to a green check mark showing everything as synced now.

Here’s the second, and much simpler way to remove a photo from being synced thanks to this latest update. You’d only use this option once you knew what photo it was (click the link to check) and if it was in more than one synced collection that you may want to add it back into later. Once you know you want to remove it from being synced, just right-click that blue link and you’ll see a new option to Remove from All Synced Photographs. This is just a short cut from the first method I showed above, but it does result in a different looking popup message you have to click through before it is done.

Hope that helps anyone with a photo stuck in the endless sync loop. To add it back to be synced, just drag it back to the synced collection it was in before (cross your fingers) and it should sync successfully.

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First, you need to download presets to your iOS device. Most commonly, you will be downloading a zip file containing the presets. If you don’t already have a zip file of presets on your device, you can test this with these free presets provided by Adobe (scroll down near the bottom) by opening that link on your iPhone or iPad. The zip file will land in the downloads folder for the browser you use on your device.

Next, open the Lightroom app on that device, select a photo, and enter edit mode. Tap the Presets icon to open that interface.

With the Presets panel open, tap the Yours category, and look for that three-dot menu in the upper-right corner.

Tap the three-dot menu and look for Import Presets in the menu that appears at the bottom.

Then navigate to the location on your device where the zip file you downloaded is located (like the Downloads folder for your web browser).

Then tap that zip file to start the import process.

That’s all there is to it. You should now see a new preset group containing those downloaded presets in the Yours section of the Preset panel. In time, those presets will sync across any other Lightroom apps you have on other devices.

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If Lightroom Classic opens and all seems exactly the same as when you last quit the program, then you are good to go, and move on using the new version. However, in some cases what seems to happen is that Lightroom Classic creates a copy of the wrong catalog, upgrades that copy, then opens it in Lightroom Classic. Upon opening, one might see all photos missing or some amount of recent photos missing. In my experience, this means that the catalog you were using is still sitting unchanged exactly where it was when you last quit the program, but maybe you had an old (possibly empty) catalog sitting in the default location, and Lightroom Classic mistakenly grabbed that catalog instead. I don’t know why this happens, but I see or get the reports of it happening every time a catalog upgrade is required.

The Solution

The fix is easy if you can find your previously used catalog file. All you need to do is quit Lightroom Classic, navigate to where your actual catalog file is stored, and double-click it to open it into Lightroom Classic, which will trigger the catalog upgrade process on that catalog, and when done, you should be good to go.

A LrC catalog file has a .lrcat file extension. You may need to change the settings in your operating system’s file browser (Finder on Mac or Explorer on Windows) to show file extensions if they are not visible on all files. It helps to change your file browser to show a list instead of icons for this task.

The default location for your catalog is in a folder named Lightroom within your Pictures folder. So, that’s the first place to look. If you have a lot of files in that location, you might check out my post on which are safe to delete (but don’t delete any .lrcat files until you’ve found the one that contains all your work).

If the catalog containing all your work is not in the default location, then think about where you may have created it originally, as some people will keep the catalog (and related files) on an external drive and navigate to that location.

Note that each time you open a catalog file to check its contents you will likely be instructed to upgrade a copy of that catalog before it can open in the new version of the software. While this is the only way to verify what’s inside, you can save yourself some trouble by checking the last modified date and file size of the .lrcat file first. If the file size is pretty small (like under 2MB) then it is probably empty and if the modified date is very old it is probably not the catalog you are looking for at this time. Look for a .lrcat file with a very recent modified date (like from right before you installed the new version of the software) and a large file size.

Once you find, upgrade, and open the correct catalog, be sure to set that one as the default catalog so that it opens each time you launch LrC in the future.

If, heaven forbid, you can’t find the desired catalog, then you’ll want to fall back on your most recent backup copy of the catalog. Hopefully, you are regularly using the built-in catalog backup function. If you don’t use the built-in backup function, then check your full computer system backup location. Here’s how to restore from a backup catalog. I hope this never happens to you, but if it does, you now know how to recover without any panic.

The post Updated Catalog Looks Wrong? appeared first on Lightroom Killer Tips.

Adaptive presets utilize the AI-based subject detection capabilities to select or mask the target subject and then apply settings to the masked area. With the new lens blur presets it will attempt to detect the subject and then apply lens blur settings to the background to simulate the type of blur you’d get from a lens. Like all adaptive presets, the quality of your results will depend on how well your subject can be detected and how well it may already be separated from other elements in the image.

While I don’t think it is intended to replace the quality of blur from a quality portrait lens shot wide open, I do think it is a useful addition to our editing toolbox when we want to enhance the existing shallow depth of field or to add some blur to further separate our subject from the background. Like most edits, this is subjective, and season to your own tastes.

You can use these presets in a couple of ways, with the first being to have the photo in Develop that you want to edit, then simply clicking the desired preset to have it detect the subject and apply the Lens Blur settings in the given preset. To get to learn what each preset can do, one can simply move your cursor over each preset in turn and see the settings preview on the photo (it will first have to detect the subject to build the mask, but once that is done it will preview quickly for each of the other presets).

Once you’ve found a preset you like, click to apply. This will activate the Lens Blur panel with the settings contained in the preset and you can tweak as desired.

If you have similar images you want to apply the same settings to, you can select them in the Filmstrip and click the Sync button to synchronize settings across the selected photos. Check the Lens Blur box (and the boxes for any other settings you want to sync).

You can also batch apply an adaptive preset right from the Library module. Start by selecting all of the photos you want to be affected by the preset, then in the Quick Develop panel, click the Saved Preset drop-down menu and choose the desired adaptive preset.

Lightroom will create an AI mask for each selected photo and apply the preset’s settings. This can take a little while depending on how many photos you selected and your system’s hardware.

Once done, switch to Develop and adjust settings on each photo as desired. You can consider these presets, like any preset, as just a starting point to move you further down the road, or if you like the look of the settings in the preset, you are done. If you’ve tweaked the settings in a preset, or just customized Lens Blur settings from scratch, you can save those settings as your own adaptive preset by clicking the + sign in the Presets panel, checking Lens Blur, and giving it a meaningful name. Now you can create your own set of adaptive presets and make the most of this cool new tool.

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Note, these updates roll out slowly all over the world, so if you don’t see the update in the Adobe Application Manager right away, check back later. Be sure to update the Camera Raw plug-in too.

Lens Blur

Elevated from Early Access mode to a full-fledged tool (powered by AI), Lens Blur allows for adding/enhancing the appearance of lens blur to your photos. As a full feature, sync, auto sync, and copy/paste are also now supported.

Generative Remove

From what was once just a spot removal tool, this Early Access version of Generative Remove adds a new option to our ability to remove distractions from our photographs. Look under the newly renamed Remove panel (formerly Heal) to find the new Generative AI option. Note, the previous versions of Heal and Clone are still there. The new Generative AI option uses Adobe Firefly to generate the new pixels in the area being replaced, so you do need to be connected to the Internet when the checkbox is enabled.

With Remove selected and Generative AI checked, use the brush to mask over the objects you want to remove, then click Apply. Adobe Firefly generates three variations of the new pixels to replace those being removed, and you can switch through each variation once it is finished. We’ll take a deeper dive into this feature here on the blog soon, but give it a try and put it through its paces. I’m pretty impressed so far.

Filter by Exported Images (Lightroom Classic)

I feel like this is a feature that has been requested since the dawn of time, but I never thought I’d see, but here it is! We can now filter our photos based on whether a copy has been exported or not. There are few ways to utilize this feature. First, under the Attribute section of the Library Filter bar there is an Export Status icon for exported or not exported.

Additionally, under the Metadata tab of the Library Filter bar there is an option for Exported Files to filter the current view.

And finally, we can also find Exported as an option when creating a smart collection. It uses the exported status and a date range, so let’s say you wanted to see every photo exported from the catalog you have open before a given date, you’d choose Exported as the criteria, is before as the range, then enter the desired date.

Sync Performance (Lightroom Classic)

If you, like me, sync your Lightroom Classic catalog to the Lightroom cloud then you’ll be happy to know this update includes a significant infrastructure upgrade to improve reliability and performance. Don’t be surprised if it seems like sync is doing more than it should at first after you’ve installed this new version.

Tethered Shooting with Sony (Lightroom Classic)

Talk about long requested features … I am so happy to finally see native Sony support included for tethering in Lightroom Classic, and I don’t even shoot Sony. I’m just happy for all of the Sony photographers who have been asking for this. Be sure to check the list of supported cameras for tethering (filter by Sony).

Speaking of tethering support, Canon photographers will be happy to learn that the R6MKII is finally now supported for tethering too.

As usual, there have also been other performance enhancements added under the hood. What’s your favorite feature in this update? Anything you are still hoping to see added in the future?

The post May Update for Lightroom Classic, Lightroom, and Camera Raw appeared first on Lightroom Killer Tips.

What happened is that I didn’t even notice it, and fat-finger hit it when trying to use the Move to command (just below it). As soon as it was tapped, the album I wanted to move just vanished from sight. Fun! Those crazy kids at Adobe wanted me to go on a bit of a goose chase.

So, I thought, let’s tap the Shared icon under My Albums and see if it is there. Hmmm … not seeing it …

Ok, at the top of this section, above My shared albums, which is where I thought it would be, is an option labeled My shared photos, so I tapped that.

Aha! I found it! Right at the top of the list, so I tapped the three dot menu next to that album and found the Show in albums menu and tapped that.

This put it right back where it was when I started this little adventure, and now I was able to do what I originally intended, though now I learned about a menu option I had never heard of or needed. My best guess is that it is for folks who want to share an album, but not have that album appear in the list under My albums on the main screen. I guess if you share a lot of albums with other people that you don’t want cluttering up this view? I just never thought of needing such an option, but now we all know in case you need it or you make the same mistake I did.

The post Only Show in Shared Photos appeared first on Lightroom Killer Tips.

• Duplicate the original background layer
• Rename the duplicated layer
• Hide the original layer
• Create a second view of the photo at 100% alongside another view of the photo that shows the entire image

This way I can start retouching the duplicated layer at 100% while simultaneously seeing how it affects the photo when zoomed out. Nothing life changing, just a few simple steps that can be done with the click of an action. This can be used the more traditional route of using the Edit in Photoshop command from LrC to send a copy to Photoshop. Once the photo opens in Ps, I’d simply run the action (press the Play button in the Action panel) and then start editing. To take it to the next level I’d create a droplet from that action. Here’s how:

Step One: In Photoshop, go to File > Automate > Create Droplet to open the Create Droplet dialog box.

Step Two: Click Choose to configure where you want your droplet to be saved (I have a designated folder in Dropbox for all actions and droplets) and give the droplet a name.

Step Three: In the Play section, choose the Action set containing your action, then in the Action section, select the action you want to be made into a droplet.

Step Four: Configure other options as needed based on what your action does (or doesn’t do). For this action, I don’t need to configure any other options, so I just clicked OK to create the droplet in the designated location.

Now that you have your droplet, you need to put it in a special folder in order for it to appear on the Export dialog in LrC. Here’s how:

Step One: Select any photo in LrC and click the Export button to open the Export dialog (we’re not going to export a copy of this photo, so anyone will do).

Step Two: On the Export dialog, in the Post-Processing panel, click the After Export drop-down menu and choose Go to Export Actions Folder Now to open this special folder in your system’s file browser (Finder/Explorer).

Step Three: Copy or move the droplet file from where you saved it when created to the Export Actions folder. Back in LrC, click Done to close the Export dialog without exporting.

That’s it. The next time you click the After Export drop-down menu you’ll see your droplet as an option below Open in Other Application. Just select it to have the exported copies run through the droplet. Note, if you get an error on Mac about the droplet being damaged when running the droplet, here’s the solution. I’d love to hear what kind of actions/droplets you use in this workflow.

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