Today Adobe released a bunch of updates to its Creative Cloud suite, along with a new Lightroom 6.4 update. Aside from the regular bugfixes and new camera and lens profiles, Adobe introduced a new feature to its panorama stitching option within Lightroom called “Boundary Warp”, which is basically a tool that allows straightening the curves we usually see in panoramas. As we have seen before, while bugfixes and camera / lens profiles are available for all versions, new features are only available for Creative Cloud subscribers, so the Lightroom 6.4 standalone update won’t include the “Boundary Warp” feature. In addition, Adobe promises to double the speed of the panorama merging process, as well as much faster thumbnail updates when settings are copy pasted to multiple images at once. I have been running Lightroom CC 2015.4 for a few hours today and while I cannot yet state if it is more stable than the previous version, the panorama stitching process is indeed much faster in comparison. Let’s take a look at the new “Boundary Warp” update in more detail.
Lightroom / ACR 9.4 Boundary Warp
While the new feature certainly looks appealing, I am not convinced that this would be a very useful feature for many panoramas, particularly ones that have a distinct horizon visible. Take a look at the below panorama from 3 vertical images:
You can see the new “Boundary Warp” option on the bottom right side of the screen. When I pushed the value from 0 to 100, the empty spaces surrounding the panorama disappeared, which is great. But look at what it did to the horizon – it now looks crooked:
I have tried this out with a few other close-range panoramas and they all seemed to do a similar thing. So this “new feature” does not seem to be all that useful in every case. However, when I tried it out on panoramas captured at longer focal lengths, particularly those with multiple rows, the Boundary Warp feature actually looked much better. It eliminated the need for cropping and left more of the scene to work with, which is nice.
For me, the biggest benefit of this new update is not the Boundary Warp feature, but the speed enhancements Adobe brought up to stitching in Lightroom CC 2015.4 / Lightroom 6.4. I stitched a 20 image panorama before the update and repeated the same process after the update and indeed, the process was about twice faster. The good news is that this speed increase is available for everyone, not just CC subscribers.
New Camera Support
Lightroom CC 2015.4 / 6.4 / ACR 9.4 updates bring support to a few newly introduced cameras:
- Fujifilm X70
- Fujifilm X-E2S
- Fujifilm X-Pro2
- Leica M (Typ 262)
- Leica X-U (Typ 113)
- Panasonic DMC-ZS60 (DMC-TZ80, DMC-TZ81, DMC-TZ85)
- Phase One IQ150
- Sony ILCA-68 (A68)
Updates and Bugfixes
And here are all the updates and bugfixes delivered in Lightroom CC 2015.4 / 6.4:
Lightroom Updates:
- Nikon 1 J4 Camera Matching Profile added
- The panorama merging process should complete roughly twice as fast as Lightroom 6.3
- Improved quality when applying Auto Straighten and Upright “Level” mode
- A preference was added to the Mac to prevent accidental “speed swiping”
- Metadata is added to merged panoramas to support Photoshop’s Adaptive Wide Angle filter
- Customers can now set the location of where photos are stored when downloaded from Lightroom mobile or Lightroom web in the preference panel or contextually in the folder panel
- Thumbnails update much quicker when copying and pasting settings in the grid view
- Images load faster in the Library module when you are zoomed in and navigating images
- Tethered support added for the Nikon D5500 and Nikon D7200
Lightroom Bugfixes:
- Auto Sync of some settings failed when using smart previews
- Lightroom would ignore model-specific custom default settings for some cameras, including some Leica and Sony models.
- Crop resets to image bounds when adjusting rotation via slider
- In Lights Out mode, an image would “disappear” if a customer uses the Undo functionality
- SIGMA 50mm f1.4 ART lens was incorrectly identified as Zeiss Milvus 50mm f1.4
- Soft Proofing RGB readout values differed for same file between 5.7.1 and 6.x
- Import from iPhoto would result in all photos receiving a “pick” flag
- Comments from Lightroom web come in to Lightroom on the desktop as already “read.”
- Lightroom would not display the correct EXIF metadata for some video files generated by Canon, Fuji and Panasonic cameras
- Vertical panoramas created using Merge could appear with the wrong orientation
- The video cache did not respect the maximum size specified in the preferences
- Customers experienced issues importing video files in some scenarios
- Tethering Nikon cameras on Mac OS X 10.11(El Capitan) did not work properly
If you use Adobe Camera RAW, below are the relevant updates:
ACR Updates:
- Nikon 1 J4 Camera matching profile support added
- The panorama merging process should complete roughly twice as fast as ACR 6.3
- Improved quality when applying Auto Straighten and Upright “Level” mode.
- Metadata is added to merged panoramas to support Photoshop’s Adaptive Wide Angle filter
- DNG Converter 9.4 now supports HiDPI displays on Mac
ACR Bugfixes:
- Fixed issue where vertical panoramas created using Merge could appear with the wrong orientation.
- Addressed a bug that would ignore model-specific custom default settings for some cameras, including some Leica and Sony models.
- Corrected occasional crash using Crop tool after a Merge operation completed.
- Fixed an issue where state of HSL controls would be rendered incorrectly in GPU mode when applying Contrast or Saturation local control adjustments.
- Addressed the issue of the SIGMA 50mm f1.4 ART lens incorrectly identified as Zeiss Milvus 50mm f1.4.
Lens Profile Support
Both Lightroom CC 2015.4 / 6.4 and ACR 9.4 have support for a bunch of new lenses from Canon, Fuji, Nikon, Olympus, Panasonic, Pentax, Samsung and Sony. The list is too huge to list – you can see it in detail on Lightroom Blog.
Download Links
Below are the download links for ACR 9.4. Creative Cloud subscribers will be receiving the update automatically. As for standalone Lightroom users, Adobe wants you to go through Help->Updates menus to download the software. Direct download links to Lightroom 6 are no longer provided by Adobe…
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