What’s New in the Oct. 2018 Update to Photoshop and Lightroom

Adobe has released updates to the entire photography ecosystem, which includes Lightroom CC, Lightroom Classic, Photoshop CC, and Adobe Camera RAW.

Here’s a rundown of what’s new, with descriptions by Adobe:

Lightroom Classic CC

Faster tethering: Experience greater speed and stability when tethering a Canon camera to Lightroom Classic CC.

One-step Merge to Panorama: Create HDR panos faster now that you can merge multiple bracketed exposures into multiple HDR photos and then stitch them into a panorama — all in one step.

Depth range masking: Make selections based on specific depth ranges in either the foreground or background of your HEIC photos.

Improved negative Dehaze: See less noise when you move the Dehaze slider to the left of zero.

Improved high-ISO rendering: Get natural color in your low-light, high-ISO shots.

Lightroom CC

People View: Find photos of specific people faster now that Lightroom uses Adobe Sensei technology to automatically sort your photos based on who’s in them.

Apple Photos import (Mac only): Easily import your Apple Photos library into Lightroom on your desktop. They’ll be synced to the cloud so you can access, edit, organize, and share them on all your devices.

Adobe Portfolio integration: Showcase your photos on the web now that you can send them directly to Adobe Portfolio from Lightroom on your desktop.

Search improvements: Start typing in the search bar and Lightroom automatically offers suggestions to help you quickly find what you need. It’s all powered by Adobe Sensei technology.

Share Tab: The new Share tab gives you an easy way to browse and access shared albums and images that you made through lightroom.adobe.com.

Improved high-ISO rendering: Get natural color in your low-light, high-ISO shots.

Photoshop CC

Content-Aware Fill reimagined: Choose which pixels to use in your fills using a new, dedicated workspace, and rotate, scale, and mirror your source pixels thanks to Adobe Sensei technology. You can even create fills on separate layers to preserve your original images.

Frame tool for easy masking: Turn shapes or text into frames that you can use as placeholders or fill with images. Easily replace an image by dropping another one into the frame — it automatically scales to fit.

Multiple Undo: Use CMD-Z to undo multiple steps, just like in other Creative Cloud apps.

Usability improvements: Now you can hide your reference point, double-click the canvas to edit text, and efficiently crop, transform, and place and enter text faster with auto-commit. Plus, Photoshop transforms pixel and type layers proportionally by default.

Lock Workspace: Use the new Lock Workspace option to prevent accidentally moving workspace panels, particularly when you’re using Photoshop on a tablet/stylus.

Live blend mode previews: No more guessing which blend mode to use. Just scroll over the different options to see how they look on your image.

Symmetry mode: Paint your brush strokes in a perfectly symmetrical pattern — even on curves. Symmetry mode lets you define an axis or axes and then choose from preset types, including circular, radial, spiral, and mandala.

Color wheel: Visualize the color spectrum to choose complementary colors more easily.

Home screen: Get started quickly with the Photoshop home screen. Access it at any time to find out about new features, connect to learning content, and jump right to your open documents.

Improved in-app learning: Use your own assets while working through tutorials to get the looks you want in less time.

Top customer requests: You asked, we delivered. Now you can distribute the spacing between objects, type simple math operations into fields that require numeric values, see the end of long layer names, and find Japanese fonts with Match Font and Font Similarity.

UI size preference: Get more control when scaling the Photoshop UI, and adjust it independent of your other apps to get the UI size just right.

Better “Export As” experience: The “Export As” menu loads faster and offers a streamlined UI to make things easier. And you can preview multiple artboards at one time.

And so much more: Also includes: A Flip Document view that lets you flip your canvas horizontally, a Lorem Ipsum text mode for quickly placing sample text, and customizable keyboard shortcuts for the Select and Mask workspace.

Camera Raw CC

One-step HDR Panorama merge: Effortlessly create HDR panoramas. You can now merge multiple bracketed exposures together to create an HDR panorama – in one step.

Depth range masking: Depth Range masking enables you to leverage depth information in photos to make precise selections and isolate subjects faster than before. This feature is available only for photos that contain Depth Masks, such as photos captured in Portrait mode on Apple iPhone 7+, 8+, X, and later.

Process Version 5: Adobe Camera Raw features an improved image processing version, by default. All new photos edited in Camera Raw 11 display better rendering for high ISO images. You also have more latitude when you use negative dehaze and easily add haze for creative effect.

To start using the new features listed above, simply update your app through the Adobe Creative Cloud updater.