Look out for Lightroom 7.3 today – the official announcement is here.

Profiles

There’s a very big change in the profiles area. Profiles have moved from the Camera Calibration tab up into the Basic panel and they are greatly extended in scope:

  • New Adobe looks
  • New “creative” looks
  • Profiles can now include LUTs.

The extension of profiles offers excellent creative choices, though I have two big fears about what Adobe have done.

One is that profiles are creeping into the same mental territory as presets, and that while the difference can be explained technically, from a user viewpoint there is no meaningful difference. People will be confused.

Secondly, I think this new emphasis on profiles will delight the snake oil sellers. As always, I do not recommend paying for third party presets or profiles. Save your money!

One very welcome change is that the whole image is now previewed when you move the mouse over a preset or profile (there’s a profile browser in Basic panel).

Face Recognition

Face Recognition has a new engine and on my system it is much, much faster and more reliable at identifying faces. They have also added the ability to rescan a folder.

Dehaze

Also, Adobe have the moved the Dehaze slider up into the Basic panel.

I think this is a bad move, unnecessarily bloating the already-packed Basic panel. But it does make sense in one way – Dehaze readily screws up the other adjustments that are set in the Basic panel. So if you really must use Dehaze on the whole image, at least now you can make the compensating adjustments in the same place as the slider that did the damage.

But I’d always recommend avoiding this global Dehaze slider and using Dehaze as a local adjustment in the brush/radial/grad filters.

iOS

There’s some good stuff in LrMobile iOS too:

  • There is now has a left handed mode. I’m not one, but always wondered how left handers used the app when their fingers would cover the photos.
  • Upright adjustments – it’s quite remarkable that we can straighten up raw photos using a phone, don’t you think?