The next Lightroom Engine (ACR) update will prune the new advanced masks.
After a year and a half work Adobe has managed to update a key part of the Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw development engine. The work was profound, as until now the masks were vectorial, very simple to keep in memory but limited as possibilities.
The development work made it possible to introduce raster type masks (pixel maps) and make room for technologies already present in other Adobe programs. Another important goal was to make the same choices available even when using Lightroom in the Mobile environment.
Advanced masks and options panel
Advanced masks like those of Photoshop
The important innovations will be in the new way of producing masks:
- Subject selection based on Artificial Intelligence
- Automatic sky selection
- Color range
- Brightness range
In the images released by Adobe there is also the “Depth Range” item, active only when loading images taken with iPhones compatible with portrait mode; allows you to isolate the subject from the bottom using depth information.
Automatic sky selection.
The new advanced masks can be inverted, added, subtracted to facilitate local intervention work. This important advancement of the raw development engine in the field of advanced masks allows you to make the most of the potential of raw files; the fact of being able to perform more and more precise selective interventions without having to go through Photoshop will facilitate the workflows of many photographers.
Selection by color range
In the Adobe world, any graphics / video application can open raw files thanks to the shared Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) plugin. Lightroom itself is an ACR-based image database. The news will then be available in programs such as Photoshop, Bridge, Indesign, After Effects, Premiere …
The news will be available in the next update scheduled for October 26 this year, for all Adobe Creative Cloud users.