I Have Good News and Potentially Some Bad News
The Good News: On Monday, I wrote a post about my favorite underrated feature from Adobe June Lightroom update, which was the fact that they updated the workflow for the Noise Reduction feature, and that: (1) They moved it to a more discoverable place (the Detail Panel), and more importantly: (2) It no longer makes a 2nd copy of your Raw image and applies the noise reduction to this new DNG image. Now it doesn’t make a 2nd copy, and it applies it to your raw image just like any other edit. I love it!
The Potentially Bad News: Depending on your workflow, this could be bad news, and here’s why: Using the old method, you could select more than one image at a time, apply noise reduction, and the whole process happened in the background, and you were free to keep editing other images. The new version broke that workflow, so if you select multiple photos and apply noise reduction, it no longer processes your images in the background. Instead, a progress bar comes up, and while it’s processing the images (which, as you know, can be a few minutes to a whole bunch of minutes, depending on the speed of your computer and how many images you’re applying it to), you can’t do anything else until it’s done. If you didn’t regularly batch process images for noise reduction, then this probably isn’t an issue at all (I never did more than the one image I was working on at the time, so it never was for me), but for some folks, this could really be an issue, and I totally get it.
Some Potentially Good News: Adobe is very aware of the issue, and I imagine they are working on some sort of solution. I’ll be keeping an eye on the issue, and if I hear anything I can share, I’ll let you know, but in the meantime, I thought it was important to let you know about the issue, and that Adobe know about it.
Important disclaimer: Anytime I mention Adobe and Lightroom in the same sentence, it triggers a small, special group of photographers who, after 12 long years, are still somehow holding out for Adobe to sell Lightroom and Photoshop as a perpetual license. If you’re one of those people, I had a frank discussion with folks feeling this way on this week’s episode of “The Grid.” You can watch it below (rather than leaving the same predictable comment as always). It starts at the 5:57 minute mark.
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Thanks, everybody. Have an awesome weekend!
-Scott
If you select multiple images, go into the Develop Module, have Auto Sync turned on, Select Denoise – LR will do the denoise to the first image and then will give a pop-up “Updating AI Settings” – “Your edits were applied, but updating AI settings may take some time” it then has a status bar and estimated time remaining. You cannot do anything else while it is updating – there is the ability to stop the process.
Ridiculous conversation. I doubt anyone using both Ps and Lr is complaining.
As you stated, Lr as a standalone would probably have cost around $225 now.
The current price (in Norway) for Lr alone is $18/month. That’s the issue.
I have commented in every venue, wish list, ETC that Adobe has… You have their ear, something I would love is when you take a synced folder (I do almost everythjing in Classic) and share it online Is love the ability to add a watermark. Whether is is a giant “Proof” type thing to deter clue ta from downloading images or a custom thing (I’ve done “Party Pic” style banners at the bottom of Red Carpet-esque pictures that I built as a watermark) where I could just sync and put that link up for people Cs exporting to get the watermark on the image. The noise workflow is a great example of them adjusting to need and streamlining workflow… Now if they could just do it in that sync world…
What I find interesting is that Adobe was obviously aware the denoise process would not operate in the background with this change and they went forward with it regardless. If a solution (hopefully in progress) to fix that was not ready, a better approach would have been to either not implement the change or simply allow the users to determine the name of the resulting dng which many had asked for on the reporting site when the dng process was first introduced.
As it stands, this is a very big problem for my workflow. I’ve used LR ever since the original beta and never have I had to resort to going backwards, until now. Kind of hard to imagine the thought process they used that allowed this change to go into production.