What is SOAU?
If you are new to the blog and the Photo Taco podcast you wouldn’t know that SOAU stands for State of Adobe Updates. I do podcast episodes with SOAU and occasionally a blog post here and there when there is something I want to make sure readers/listeners know about. I HIGHLY recommend that if your business relies upon Adobe products, and for most photographers that is 100% true, don’t update until you have checked things out here and get the Photo Taco seal of approval.
There have been too many updates over the years that have caused problems for hard working photographers who get significantly impacted when there are even little speed bumps along the way. Save yourself a lot of time and angst. Let me and other early adopters take the arrows, if there are any, and wait for us to sound the all clear before you update Photoshop, Lightroom, Windows, or macOS.
Lightroom Classic CC 7.3.1 Update April 2018
Adobe released an update to Lightroom Classic CC in April 2018 that squashes a few bugs. You can check out the release notes over at the Adobe Photoshop Feedback Forum to get the details straight from the horses mouth. Or you can just read on to get my take on things.
Noteable Bug Fixes
- Some Presets Not Converting to New Format: With version 7.3 Adobe changed how presets work under the covers, which means that if you installed 7.3 a conversion of all presets you already had installed had to be done. For the most part that was working, but there were issues. Enough issues this was something that made me say if you count on presets as part of your workflow you should wait and not install version 7.3 of Lightroom Classic CC. Update 7.3.1 claims to have addressed those issues, but I want to continue watching the Adobe Forums for a little longer before I will give the all clear here and my Photo Taco Seal of Approval.
- Black and White Mix Settings Failed to Copy/Paste: I personally have a hard time seeing what to do with photos in black and white, a skill I haven’t really developed yet. But there are plenty of you out there who are REALLY good at it and make it a massive part of your workflow. With 7.3 if you worked on black and white for one photo and then used any of the various mechanisms to copy settings to another photo, the black and white mix didn’t go. Looks like it is all fixed in 7.3.1.
- Catalog Backup Errors: Yikes. This is a bad one, and it wasn’t introduced in 7.3. It looks like it was introduced with the first version of Lightroom Classic CC (version 7.0). As I am sure many of you do, I rely heavily on the auto-backup feature of Lightroom to make backups of my Catalog file to make sure I don’t lose thousands of hours of edits. It is important enough to me that I have configured Lightroom to ask me every time I exit the program if I want to do a backup (Edit menu on Windows / Lightroom menu on Mac -> Catalog Settings -> General tab -> set Backup to “Every time Lightroom exits”). Turns out there have been issues with those auto-backups for quite some time now. It is resolved with this update, though there are still problems with Mac such that the backup cannot be compressed. It is listed as a known issue of this update:”When backing up your catalogs on macOS, Lightroom Classic doesn’t compress (zip) catalogs that have a file size less than 4 GB. As a workaround to this issue, manually compress the backed up catalog files. Compressed files take up less hard disk space. By default, Lightroom Classic saves backed up catalogs to the following location on macOS:
/Users/[user name]/Pictures/Lightroom/[catalog name]/Backups”
Profile Challenges
Version 7.3 included a fairly significant update to a feature that has been part of Lightroom for a long time – profiles. It is a feature that most photographers probably weren’t familiar with and in this update it has been brought up front and center to help photographers save time with their post processing. You can get a full rundown of what was done to profiles in my Photo Taco Lightroom 7.3 Profiles Explained! episode.
Turns out that there are quite a few people having significant trouble with the large preview of what applying the profile would look like. Enough difficulty that it has become a fairly supported feature request in the Photoshop Feedback forum (https://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/add-the-possibility-to-disable-full-image-preset-preview). If you are having trouble with the large preview then you should vote for the feature and add the details of what you are running Lightroom on to help Adobe troubleshoot the issue.
Photo Taco Status
I still can’t quite give the full Photo Taco Seal of Approval for the Lightroom Classic CC 7.3.1, though we seem to be getting really close. I currently recommend version 7.2 as the most stable release to be running, especially if presets are a big part of your workflow. Not that 7.2 means you are guaranteed to not have any challenges (we know that catalog backups are a problem), and if you do have problems then be sure to head over to https://feedback.photoshop.com and let them know. If presets are not a big part of your workflow and you don’t use profiles then 7.3.1 looks pretty good to go as of mid-May 2018.