What’s New in Lightroom CC 2015.8 / 6.8?

Lightroom CC 2015.8 and Lightroom 6.8 have been released today, and there are some great improvements, as well as the normal camera/lens support and bug fixes for everyone. (For the update links, skip to the end of the post.)

So what’s new?

Reference View (CC only)

If you’ve ever wished for a Compare view in the Develop module, you’ll love this new Reference View feature. Before I tell you HOW to use it, let’s briefly consider a few reasons you might WANT to use it:

• Matching photos shot at same time using different cameras.
• Trying to match a raw file to its in-camera jpeg.
• Trying to match photos that will be displayed together, perhaps on the wall or in an album.
• Replicating a “look” of a different photo.
• A skin tone reference shot (like an old-fashioned Kodak Shirley card).
• I’m sure you can think of a few more uses!

You may have previously used Locked Secondary Window for the same purpose, but this is more useful if you’re on a single monitor.

To enable Reference view:

1. Click the R/A button in the Develop module toolbar or use the shortcut Shift-R.
2. Drag and drop the reference photo onto the left pane or right-click on thumbnail in Grid view/Filmstrip and select Set as Reference Photo.
3. Go ahead and edit the active photo as you normally would.
4. To switch back to normal single image view, click the Loupe icon in the toolbar or press D.

The reference photo disappears when you switch modules, but if you lock the lock icon, it remains selected until you quit Lightroom. The RGB values also show under the Histogram for both the reference (left) and active (right) photo.

Performance Improvements

The developers have been hard at work making “under the hood” improvements for performance including:

• Background tasks such as preview building are temporarily paused while you’re working in Develop to improve responsiveness.
• Backup to a NAS is now faster.
• File/folder move performance has been improved, especially on Windows.

Sync Catalog Disaster Recovery (CC only)

If you’ve ever lost your main Sync catalog, you’ll have discovered that Lightroom 2015.7 or earlier asks you to delete everything from the cloud and start syncing from scratch. This is a problem if you have photos or metadata that haven’t yet synced down to your desktop catalog.

Lightroom 2015.8 allows you to create a new catalog and switch to syncing the empty catalog. This downloads the cloud data to your computer. It’s not perfect yet, but it’s good to see some progress in this area. These are the main warnings:

• It only manages to link photos with the originals if they haven’t moved since they were first synced. If it can’t match up photos with their originals, “finding missing photos” can be a very long job.
• It can’t link up with an existing catalog, so if you have backups but they’re out of date, you’re out of luck. You’d have to let it sync to an empty catalog and then attempt to merge the catalogs. Messy!
• Only specific metadata is sent to the cloud, and the originals are not synced from the desktop.

Frequent catalog backups are still essential. This new rescue option is still a last-resort.

Other improvements include:

• In the Metadata Filters and Smart Collections, you can now filter for images with snapshots. (CC only.)
  
• You can now right-click on a Collection Set and choose Export as Collection Set as a Catalog, rather than having to select the individual collections.
• Catalogs larger than 4GB are now zipped again, but they’re too big for macOS to unzip natively, so you’ll need 7-zip or StuffItExpander if you need to restore a backup.

New camera support:

• Canon EOS M5
• Fujifilm X-A3
• Google Pixel
• Google Pixel XL
• Hasselblad X1D
• Leica TL
• Nikon D5600
• Olympus E-M1 Mark II (preliminary support)
• Olympus PEN E-PL8
• Panasonic LUMIX DMC-FZ2500 (DMC-FZ2000 and DMC-FZH1)
• Pentax K-70
• Samsung Galaxy S7
• Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge
• Sony Alpha a6500 II (ILCE-6500)
• Sony Alpha a99 II (ILCA-99M2)
• Sony DSC-RX100 Mark V
• Click to view the full list of supported cameras

Tethering for new cameras:

• Canon EOS 5D Mark IV
• Click to view the full list of cameras supported for tethering.

New camera profiles:

• Canon 5DS – updated lower contrast Adobe Standard v2 profile
• Canon 5DSR – updated lower contrast Adobe Standard v2 profile

New lens profiles:

Further user-created profiles can be downloaded using the Lens Profile Downloader (scroll down slightly, it’s at the end of the Resources section on that link)

Bug fixes:

There are loads of bug fixes. Adobe only publishes the bugs reported by users, which this time include:

Import/Tethering

• Resolved issues when importing from an Apple iPhone or iPad using USB.
• Video files from Sony cameras were not being imported into Lightroom.
• iPhone Live photos can now be correctly imported on Windows machines.

Library

• Fixed – Lightroom CC 2015.7: Badge numbers in Grid view not visible on Sierra.
• Fixed – Sort by capture time doesn’t always work on 2015.7 / 6.7.
• Fixed – Library collection panel scrolls unexpectedly when you duplicate/rename/delete a collection set.
• Fixed – Selected Published Folder or Collection is not deselected if a folder is selected.
• Zoom to Fit/Fill now works correctly on retina screens, even if the original photo is too small. (Previously, only Survey view enlarged small photos to fit – feature request here.)

Develop

• Released a new set of Camera Matching Profiles for Canon 5D Mark IV.
• Improved support for Canon 5D Mark IV dual pixel raw images.  Please see this tech note for further details.
• Fixed – Tone curve is Insensitive to MacBook Pro Touch Pad
• Fixed – Allow image panning by holding down space bar and then swipe with two fingers when local correction tool (such as the Local Adjustment Brush or Radial Filter) is activated.
• Fixed – Inconsistent preset sorting issue.

Edit in Photoshop

• Fixed – Opening photos in Photoshop from Lightroom using Edit In
  does not work correctly for some operations.

Slideshow

• Fixed – Problem with watermark opacity in export slideshow.
• Fixed – Will not export both portrait and landscape oriented pictures
  as a slideshow video in 720 or 1080.
• Fixed – Slideshow not working, only getting black screen.
• Fixed – Background images in Slideshow sometimes appeared pixelated.

Map & Web

• Fixed – Map and Web modules do not work correctly with 4K UHD monitor.

Export

• Fixed – Lightroom would show an error dialog when attempting to open an image in Photoshop. Please note that this only occurred on Windows and only when selecting “Open in Photoshop” as a Post­Processing item in the Export dialog.

Preferences & Performance

• Fixed – Preferences Language value missing on Sierra.
• Fixed – Some memory leaks.

If you find another bug, click here to report it.

How do I update?

To update, go to Help menu > Updates or click the Update button in the CC app. The update servers take a while to push the updates around the world, to avoid crashing the servers, but if you’re in a hurry to update, here are the direct links to the patches: Windows – Mac

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